It has been a few weeks now since Google launched their latest addition to their online repertoire of tools, their latest addition is Buzz. Essentially Buzz is aimed squarely at getting your social networking attention, designed as a competitor to everyones long term favourite Facebook.

Buzz sounds awfully promising in what it intends to deliver, in that it is intended to be a central online place that brings together all aspects of things that you want to share with others whether its just your family or the whole world. If you want to share pictures – Buzz links up with your Flickr or Picasa web albums to ingeniously show off your photos. Same idea for videos from your YouTube account, or tweets you publish from your Twitter account.

Buzz allows you to link up all of these aspects of your social networking life and share them. I guess what it intends to do is to give a central location so that there is no need for you to post to twitter, do the usual copy and paste and re-post it for your other friends on facebook who don’t use twitter. While doing this is does away with the need for users to navigate away from Buzz as it shows videos and pictures as part of the timeline that you’re viewing.

There are a few detractors here, as with any social network it relies heavily on you’re friends also being a part of the same online community. If you have a lot of friends using Gmail already or that you communicate with through Google Talk etc you will probably find that Buzz works really well for you. However if you – like me – have become so centralised around Facebook I’m seeing may not work as well for me. Where is the fun of posting and putting content into a social network that never gets any attention from the people I want to see it.

Apart from this as one drawback I see, I have had nothing but trouble trying to get this to connect to my different sites. It just seems to lock up and freeze all the time. To add to this it just doesn’t seem to come across as being polished or elegant to use. This may just be a part of me needing to get connected with more people on the service, or it could also be that I’m so used to using Facebook now that I need to re-train my brain.

So it may just be me but it seems to be a little under-ripe, and perhaps in time it will mature and become more of a useful service for me. However, while I’m willing to sign up and give it a go I just don’t know whether it is going to be a game changer for me. If you have any suggestions for getting more out of Buzz or have opinions one way or the other about the service feel free to leave a comment and let us all know what you think.