My perspective is that if they lower the bar to entry they would have much better adoption. Once you had users in Buzz all day, managing their various public profiles, fb, rotten tomatoes, delicious, etc, then they would get more comfortable using the native buzz updates and those other networks would start to become less relevant.

I did play with the buzz integration in Maps 4.0, but as it is on my ‘work’ phone, it created an orphaned Google profile (no buzz for Google apps yet) – so a word of advice, don’t try it if your android phone is associated with a Google apps account!

As far as Twitter, same thing applies. There is even more overlap and commonality between the two services. Google doesn’t want you to use Twitter. The only reason they are aggregating is that they need something to jump start your ‘buzz’. They will enhance this service over time to compete in this ecosystem vs coexist. Which makes sense as people are tire of ‘yet another social media app’ and are ready to move on to having that information be more useful. Part of that step is breaking the paradigm of these stand alone services that are duct taped together. However, Twitter has an advantage in that it is a very specific use. Mainly the concept of mass contact, like email blasts. You don’t care who follows you, you just want to get the word out. There is no real sensitive data attached to your account and you are perfectly content and encouraged to allow others to ‘re-tweet’ your tweets. There is still a wall of anonymity. Whereas integrating Google Buzz to such private information is a bit different in how people will perceive and use the service. The question is, is the value added from Buzz’s service enough to dethrone the paradigm that Twitter has set forth…time will tell. Even though people use Twitter to share their personal information, it’s real value comes from the marketing and advertising uses of it. I’m assuming that is what Buzz for Biz will hope to achieve.

As per the standalone Buzz app, yes, I agree, only because Buzz isn’t completely fleshed out yet and to introduce users to the basics of buzz and then have them relate that to how it is and will continue to integrate into 1) Google services and 2) 3rd party developers. Buzz actually should show in your native Gmaps application vs the mobile site. What Google does need to do however, is revisit their basic apps that this is to be integrated into and get better acquainted with providing offline access…heck ALL developers need to get on that train of offline access for their apps, all you need is a little bit of caching and background checking