Late Tuesday night, Google announced and simultaneously sort-of-launched its latest push into the social networking game, the fairly simply named Google Buzz.

Of course, as with many of Google’s other, more interesting ventures, it wasn’t made widely available immediately, likely for fear that something on the technical side might not be able to support all of Google’s Gmail users deciding they’d like to see what the new service was all about. Still, despite the fact that some estimates yesterday put the total number of Gmail accounts with access to Google Buzz at around the 1% mark, it seems that those who wanted access to the service found a way to get access.

Indeed, of the variety of quick and dirty ways to gain access to Google Buzz floating around on Twitter, perhaps the easiest suggestions were that users simply log out of Gmail and log back in again, a process that worked out neatly for some users, but to no avail for others. Similarly, having a friend who has already had their Google Buzz account activated reference you in a Buzz update (a process identical to Twitter and Facebook’s messaging; type an “@” and then the person’s name) seems to be a more surefire way of getting things moving, though it hasn’t worked for everyone.

All that said, those of us who have made it into Google Buzz seem to have been less than impressed with the whole affair. It has the feeling of Facebook’s live updates, though perhaps a little stranger in its implementation. Buzz will notify you that there have been X number of new events since your last sign-in, but those events are often buried under mountains of other content.

Moreover, because Buzz seems set by default to tie in to other accounts (Twitter, FlickR, Blogger, Picasa and others) the stream of updates seems a little watered down with automated updates.

The problem, essentially, is that we still don’t know exactly what it is that Buzz is meant to do. If it’s just another Twitter style update feed to keep track of, then it seems unlikely that people will show any real interest; if it can offer something more, then it seems reasonable to assume that users will follow.

There are, of course, other issues with Buzz, the biggest of which being the fact that it, essentially, spams your Gmail account with a new mail every time it updates. If you’re having that issue then you’d do well to set up a filter to a custom label, one that bypasses the inbox. While it makes sense for non-Irish people to do this with the word “Buzz,” it can have a more negative impact on us, blocking mails with subject lines like,

“Coming out tonight? The buzz will be mental”

Most will be better served by opting to block/filter messages with “Buzz:” in the subject line. It should save some headaches. You’ll also note that you can’t create a custom label named “Buzz,” as it’s reserved for internal use. Instead, we’re using “Buzz Garbage” here, which does the job nicely.

There are other issues too, not least of which the fact that everything is set to “Public” by default. There’s also the fact that Yahoo still owns a service called Yahoo! Buzz… Still, people will vote with their feet, and we could end up eating our words on this one, but it seems unlikely that Buzz, in its current incarnation, will catch on in any great hurry.

If you still don’t have access to Google Buzz but want to give it a try, you can try either of the approaches listed above, or you can try hitting Buzz.Google.com and see if that will sort you out; it seems to be working for more people today than yesterday.