In my opinion, Social networking concepts can never fit in a e-mail client. E-mails are mainly for one-on-one communication or one-on-few communication, whereas social networking status updates are about one-on-many communication. You cannot bring one-on-many into a one-on-few application (but the reverse is always easy, remember Chat inside GMail??).
It is not so comfortable for me to do networking over mail because of three reasons:
- I go to gmail, to check/send my mails, nothing else (not to do know what my friends are doing).
- Using e-mail client to do networking is like using screw-driver to dig a well. It doesn't do justice, I need the right tools.
- As long as gmail is just a email client it will be sweet and simple. Buzz is going it make it more cluttered.
Yahoo introduced the same feature in its mail a year back(it is called Yahoo Profiles), but it didn't reach even the day-to-day Yahoo mail users. Infact, the Yahoo version had much more features than Google Buzz. Personally I am not comfortable with both Google Buzz and Yahoo profiles because of the reasons I quoted above.
Facebook is growing like water hyacinth, lot of internet players including Google is facing a big threat because of facebook. Google Wave was the first initiative from Google to fight back, but it didn't do justice to the company (I liked the demo of Google Wave very much tough). For an end-user, making his e-mail a part of social networking is a easier task than making his social networking as a part of e-mail. Knowing this fact, Facebook would soon bring in e-mail into their product, that would definitely bring everything under one roof for its users.
The usual "Google" factor is driving this feature as of now, it might be yet another Google Wave (or possibly orkut???). Let us wait and see.
P.S: What I have expressed above is only my personal view and I don't represent any company in anyway
