It’s rather telling for Google that just 24 hours after launching a new product, people already seem somewhat overwhelmed by the hype surrounding it. Like Google Voice, chatter surrounding its new ‘Buzz’ product has flooded the blogosphere like some kind of tech-based plague, with some people obviously loving it and others being distinctly unimpressed.

In short, Buzz is a social media sharing service built into your Gmail window. Buzz will let you share photos, links, videos, and status updates through your Gmail inbox or your mobile device’s browser. It also makes it really easy to find geo-tagged Buzz messages based on location while you’re out and about.

The idea is that the people you contact regularly via email will become an instant social network, which seems to make sense. There’s no ‘who should I follow?’ dilemma, as you already know everyone in your address book.  But do you really need to recreate what you already have elsewhwere, in multiple places? And do you really want to use the people you email the most as the basis for a ready made social network?

Here we see a bit of a contradiction in Google’s strategy. It already segments its users in terms of accounts. Those with normal Google accounts will have access to Buzz this week for instance, but a Premier Edition account holder will have to wait (which puts a strange spin on the concept of paying for ‘more’ services). On one hand, Google wants users to integrate their social networking content into their email contacts, making the lines even more blurred, whereas on the other it wants separate log-ins for each service – dividing and conquering as it goes.

For those that have a single, transparent profile online, Buzz is great. But for those that are more private (heaven forbid) or use different emails for home/work use, will this cause issues? Do a large number of people use Google accounts for business correspondance? Perhaps the brand is assuming not, and therefore this won’t be a problem.

Despite this initial cynicism, Buzz has an automatic user base, and it’s directly tied to location, therefore becoming much more of a threat to the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare than to networks like Twitter. With all this convergence going on, will this make Google the out-and- out winner? Or will Facebook’s upcoming in-house webmail service steal a big chunk of Gmail’s user base? Time will tell.