I remember that TechCrunch once had an article calling AT&T a big, steaming, heap of failure. Well, today, as I write this Google Buzz editorial, I wanted to throw in my own adjectives on the matter.

I understand that there are a few people that are greatly happy with Google Buzz. They loved that auto-follow feature that let Google make decisions for them, they loved their exploitation of their privacy, and they loved that if there was a million comments on the story, they were about to read the whole damn thing while scrolling just to find the next one.

The problem there is that there's only a few of those people. The rest either disabled Google Buzz from their Gmail, like myself, or have just shunned it outright. The hype was just shy of magnificent when Google first announced this thing. Wow! It was a new social network on top of the other 168346 we use that was BUNDLED with Gmail. Did it ever occur to you, Google, that there's more people that don't use Gmail, than people who do. And a new social network was not going to drive them to your email service.

On top of that, there isn't really integration with other social networks! Oh sure, you can import your Twitter to Google Buzz to put all your statuses in one place. That's great, Goog. Can I call you Goog? Excellent. So, let me just import all of my tweets onto Buzz, abandon my 100+ followers, and come to Google Buzz where I can share all of that with my 3 followers using Gmail. Strong game plan.

The final thing that blows it all out of the water is that Google Buzz just simply is a service that was not needed in the first place. We have Facebook, we have Twitter, we have LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg--other ways to share content with others. Google said that there was a social network always hidden under Gmail. The fact is, no there wasn't. Gmail is a way to check our email and even chat with other email users that were online. Google Buzz didn't show us any breakthrough features that we haven't already seen in our current social networks.

So with all this in mind, I declare Google Buzz a large, grotesque, wad of failure.