Feeling overwhelmed by the bevy of social networking services? Google wants to help — by adding one to the list. On Tuesday the company unveiled Google Buzz, another way for people to tell other people what they’re doing, thinking and feeling.

As expected, the Google Buzz service is tied to Gmail and lets any Gmail user write status updates that other users can see. If you create a Google profile page, your posts will go out to the full Web too.

Google Buzz also lets people post links, YouTube videos and photos from Google’s Picasa service. At launch, Google will let people link Buzz to their Flickr and Twitter accounts as well. A similar courtesy has yet to be extended to Facebook.

People will find the Google Buzz notes right in their Gmail in-boxes, where they’re marked with a special Buzz icon that looks like a cartoon text bubble filled with Google’s signature primary colors. The comments that follow an update, also known as a Buzz, are grouped in a similar fashion to the way Gmail handles a thread of messages.

There are some added smarts as well. For example, Buzz will direct you to follow status updates from the people that you most frequently e-mail and chat with (if you use Google’s chat service). In addition, Google will suppress status updates judged to be boring because they have, say, just a couple of words or a lack of comments. Meanwhile, Google will recommend a possible Buzz of interest if a couple of your friends have been commenting on it.

“The stream of messages has become a torrent,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product development at Google. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

The message here is that Google intends to apply its algorithmic smarts to social networking and do away with the gunk – “A good day,” “Apples are yummy,” “Jasper is soooo funny” – that’s slowing us down.

But Google Buzz will look familiar to users of other social sites. And instead of being able to connect to all of your Facebook friends on Buzz, you can mostly connect only to folks within Gmail’s walled garden. While your Buzz posts can go out to your Twitter account, messages from the people that you follow on Twitter don’t come into the Buzz world.

Analysts said they found Google’s decision to act more as an aggregator than a standalone social networking site predictable. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace are the clear leaders in this market, and Google had to try something different.

“The other companies are pretty well established,” said Augie Ray, an analyst at Forrester Research. “This will have to be part of a larger-scale effort if it’s going to succeed.”

Mr. Horowitz said Google fully intends to bring other services like Facebook into Google Buzz and do things like creating richer connections to Twitter. In addition, Google has attempted to surpass the competition by adding a sophisticated mobile aspect to Buzz.

The location-based features of Buzz will be accessible on the mobile Web or through an app that for now is Android-only. The phone will use a GPS unit to find roughly where you and then bring up a list of nearby businesses. If you’re at Zucca’s restaurant on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif., you can select that and then Buzz away, linking your thoughts to a place. These Buzzes will appear when your friends pull up maps from Google covering the area where you Buzzed.

Google Buzz will only appear as an option to about 1 percent of Gmail users as of Tuesday. Over the course of the week, it will roll out to all users.

Down the road, Google intends to make a corporate version of Buzz for companies that purchase its higher-end e-mail services. It has been testing this service internally.

“As an executive, I am able to peer down and see conversations that I could never see before,” said Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google. “You find engineers who are sometimes reluctant to copying senior people on e-mails talking in a more relaxed manner.”

Those of us who live and breathe technology often accuse the rest of the planet of being populated by spoonfed idiots who have problems comprehending their DVD player, let alone the way that technology is changing the world around them.

Usually, our reactions are an overstatement - just a matter of a people needing a little more hi-tech literacy, and our anger borne from having to provide computer support to all manner of friends who haven't worked out that they should probably try turning it off and on again.

But sometimes your worst fears are given a real form - when you see the responses what is a browser, for example, or as shown by a little incident when the site ReadWriteWeb wrote about Facebook.... with hilarious consequences.

Yesterday RWW wrote a post about how Facebook was partnering with AOL, in a way that would make the site's login procedure more powerful than ever before - headlining the story "Facebook wants to be your one true login".

Suddenly, thanks to the magic of Google, that post became the most heavily-featured result for searches like "Facebook login" - which caused all kinds of confusion.

It looks like a number of users clicked on the top result, expecting to be taken to Facebook's login page (also known as, erm, facebook.com) and instead being presented with this ENTIRELY DIFFERENT site.

The post now has a comment thread of around 300 posts, many from disgruntled Facebook users who have clicked and can't work out what's happened to the site they know and love.

While some of the comments are from jokers, many appear to be genuinely confused users. It's the sort of thing that makes you despair - when can't even work out they're not on the site they think they are, let alone understand that they could always reach Facebook by simply typing the address into the browser.

But, lest we simply laugh at the failure of the great unwashed to get the web, let's take a couple of serious points away from the whole thing.

First, it's a bit of a failure on Google's part. If Facebook users want to log in to the site, and Google's returning something that isn't Facebook's front page, then they're not delivering useful search results. That's not great for Google.

Secondly, perhaps we should refigure our idea of how many people actually use the web in this way. While the confused commenters largely seem to be middle-aged non-web-literate people, that doesn't mean they're stupid - just ill-informed.

As Matt Haughey, who runs community site Metafilter, said: "Laugh all you want about ReadWriteWeb, but two weeks ago I watched a 35 year-old friend with a PhD go to Facebook by googling 'facebook login'."