One week ago a new four-colored dialog box appeared in my Gmail account.  And I don’t mean some clunky square computer dialog box that we’ve all grown accustomed to, I mean an honest to goodness comic book style dialog box.

Clearly this was some new sort of chat functionality, which surprised me, as I already had a GTalk session open.

Apparently Google was launching it’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, and you know what, I couldn’t be bothered.  I already have all the personal social media tools I need.  In fact, I have more social media tools at my disposal than I know what to do with.

But, of course, the key to a social media tool isn’t so much what it does, but who’s on it.  Even anonymous dating sites can serve as effective social media tools if you know your friends ’secret’ names.  So I figured I’d give Buzz a week to get up to speed and then take a peek around to see who was there.

Silly me - Buzz doesn’t have a sign up process, or at least not one of it’s own.  If you have a Google profile (and if you use Google for anything other than anonymous searches, you do) you are given a Buzz account.

Okay, so my friends all already have accounts.  In fact, everyone I know with a Google e-mail address already has an account, and I can follow it right away.  That’s wonderful.  There are just a few small problems.

• Since everyone was given an account automatically, I can’t easily tell who is and is not using the service (though after some digging I discovered that most are not).
• Some of the people in my address book aren’t friends.  There is no reason for me to see what their status is.
• Likewise, there are people who could follow me who have no reason to know what I’m up to.  In fact, I still sometimes get SPAM, which means I know there are people who I don’t want learning my daily activities who could, in theory gain access.

Those strike me as some fairly big disincentives to posting accurate status messages.  Since status form the spine of most modern social media services, it would seem that Buzz is a technological invertebrate.  To make matters worse, my GTalk status is automatically imported into Buzz whether I want it to be or not - which means I can’t really give my status there anymore either.

There’s another problem with the Buzz approach…

Most social media sites provide you with a way to expand your social circle.  Buzz lets you learn what people in your address book are up to.  I can tell you right now that I already know everyone in my address book - and if I want to know what they’re up to I can send them an e-mail.

So not only does Buzz introduce security issues into my Google account that hadn’t originally been there, but it doesn’t even add value to the services already available.

As always, the folks at Google are responding well to both positive and negative feedback.  However, without major changes, I will be very surprised if this networking tool doesn’t suffer the same sort of colony collapse as Google’s other social media attempts.