Is this a privacy issue or will it enable a new level of sharing and worldwide interaction? Probably both. Within my first few minutes of using this feature I had replied to buzzes from 4 continents and some islands that I will probably never visit. True, you can do that with twitter but it feels much more interactive and fun here. Its also potentially more invasive as you're somewhat linking your email accounts together, a much more personal interaction than a twitter profile.
How does this differ from google latitude, the failed geolocation application that was supposed to have learned from the startup dodgeball? It really doesn't. Except that this actually is fun. Why is it fun? I can't even tell you. It doesn't have a game element like foursquare, gowalla, or mytown. It doesn't have a let's share where we are so we can meet up and party attitude like brightkite or dodgeball. It's basically just google latitude done over again. The main difference that I see here is that instead of approaching it from a privacy concerned viewpoint it just popped up as a new layer on my map, and it was full of little bubbles I could read. Compare this to brightkite, a service that started in Denver and for years has tried to get this late adopter city to post geolocation statuses, and the the difference is immediately apparent. On brightkite there are "2" status updates within 4 kilometers of me in the past 2 hours. Then look at the image above. Buzz has been up for about 24 hours and look at all those messages. Whether or not Buzz is a facebook or twitter killer, I don't know, but bye bye brightkite. All bk has going for it is its facebook integration, which buzz is not likely to get.
We'll just have to see how this plays out, but its very interesting and I predict incredibly explosive growth unlike anything we've seen before.
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