Google’s big announcement from yesterday evening saw the company detail a new social-networking style service that simply goes by the name of Google Buzz.

It’s an interesting move, and one that sees Google attaching what ammounts to a Twitter or Facebook-updates style functionality to a number of its different web-based services. It’s a curious move, but Google has managed to be fairly persuasive about it, to say nothing of being quick to point out the plethora of different services to which Google Buzz can be appended, including Picasa, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

Google’s own description of the new service details Buzz as having close integration with your Gmail, which outlines a service that feels fairly similar to Twitter. Users can “recommend” a post by a user they know to their friends, which sound an awful lot like Twitter’s retweet functionality… Still, there are plenty of people for whom setting up a Twitter account an downloading a standalone client feels like a lot of effort, and having similar functionality built into Gmail could do very well indeed.

According to the folks at Google,

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

Interestingly enough, reports have been streaming in that you can get to see Buzz even if your account hasn’t had it added yet by hitting Buzz.Google.com from your mobile, but it doesn’t work from Android devices…

While there’s a fairly lengthy post about it over at the official Google blog, Buzz is perhaps best summed up by the video that the folks at Google have posted to its YouTube profile, which gives a little more detail on just what users can expect…