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...