This week I'm catching up on what's happening in the tech world after my three-week social media detox.

The title for this post should be "Google Buzz Catchup, but I thought it a better thing to say that with a New Zealand accent.

I don't mind gadgets or OSes that have some built-in difficulty, just so long as they're intuitive to work out.

I've been using the mobile version of Google Buzz on my phone and my desktop's Safari browser since the weekend, hardly needing to go into Gmail.

Google's Buzz is up and running.

The beauty of Buzz is that Friendfeed's fans will feel at home with it.

In essence, if someone like Robert Scoble puts an update out over buzz, as they did over at Friendfeed with him, his contacts can have a whole conversation from that point on.

Where it differs from Friendfeed is that it's integrated into your Gmail account.

So if you've already got some friends via the Gmail address book, you already have a starter group to "buzz."  Not just that, think of the size of the user base.

You can share privately or publicly.  You can use photos with it.  You can import from Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader.  Plus, you already have a spam filter.

At the moment my laptop's access to Google hasn't received the update to buzz, whereas my iPhone can access buzz via the mobile Buzz site.

I have to admit, it's renewed some enthusiasm for Google stuff.  My contacts on Google Reader are small compared to my Twitter account.

And it's faster by far than Google Wave.

While I like Wave, Buzz is a lot closer to where I think Wave should be.  I daresay that will be clearly demonstrated in the next few weeks.  I also think former and current Friendfeed users will be at the forefront of using Buzz to do a better job than Wave.

Perhaps that'll spur the Wave developers to move forward with some much-needed changes.

Of course, Wave and Buzz are both horses in the same Google stable, so it's no real problem.

General verdict on Buzz?  Out of ten?  Very nearly a ten.

At least until I see how much bandwidth it chews up...

It seems to be the week for new changes in online services to be rolled out.  It wasn't more than a few days ago Facebook was bringing out the change to users' Home layout.

Now Google is about to unveil a new module in Gmail.

As this technology article in the Wall Street Journal points out, we can look forward to social media style updates without having to move from our Gmail screen.

This should be quite interesting when you think of all the Google properties which roughly correspond to say, yFrog or Twitvid.   Google already have Google FriendConnect, Picasa, Youtube, just to name a few.  Throw in Google Maps natively there...

According to Techcrunch, what's going to be announced should also make it easier to view media in Gmail.

So will this new form of Google social updates be mainly for all the friends you have in the Googleverse?  Or will it tie into your existing social update sites?

We'll know by 10am U.S. Pacific Time on the 9th of February.  As Mashable points out, tech media have been invited to an event at Google HQ at that time for a big announcement or two.

Now if we could only get Google to announce they've sped up Wave considerably...

Last weekend, Twitter did a cleanout of spammer accounts.

The most immediate effect was that most peoples' follower lists dropped a bit as the spammers following them were purged from the system.  For most, that was a good thing, giving them a more accurate representation of their real influence.  After all, it's the amount of real followers that tells you your true worth to your Twitter community, not spammers.

I would like to hope most people were glad to see the spambots gone.  But I'm sure there would have been one or two who thought that having a big list of followers, regardless of its real-to-spambot ratio, meant something.  I feel sorry for such people because a list with the majority of followers being spam really isn't any value at all.

Me?  I prefer a list where almost all the followers are real, where they converse with me, where they and I share jokes and funny news iterms.

Anyway, it wasn't totally effective.  New spammers seemed to still pop up in the days since, with some interesting things noted about this latest batch.

I've found, on my own follower list, that there's a discrepency between the numbers, depending on what client you're viewing the list through.  Then there's spammers showing up on a third-party client like Tweetie-for-iPhone, but not showing in the Twitter web version.

The other thing I've noticed this week is that the ratio of spammer new followers to real is getting out of hand.  I counted a small amount of new REAL followers.  The rest of my new followers, which made a clear majority, were spammers.

I'm now wondering if Twitter is reaching the point where its getting less and less new real people.

It's like what happened with Yahoo groups a few years back.  Groups were great as long as there were more real people there.  But eventually there got to be too many spammers, spambots and pornbots.  Before long, there were hardly any real people in most of the groups.

Twitter is still a good service, but its been hit by a few security issues this past year.  It needs to be a  bit tighter on security, verification and a couple of other  things.  If it gets that right, then everyone's experience will be that much better.  But if it doesn't take the security and spammer issue a bit more seriously, it runs the risk of being overtaken by services which solve the spammer issue.

While I'm being a bit critical, I've often pointed out that Twitter Search really needs to be able to show ALL one's tweets all the way back, not merely one month, and in one's ordinary account rather than having to access the API to go back further than a month.

Seriously, if you want to be considered a contender to Google, you have to be able to index as far back as possible.

That said, I'll kick myself off my soapbox.  Have a great weekend