I’m not an early adopter of the latest tool. I’ll happily  sit back and wait for the dust to settle before I consider using any new application.

It has been my experience that this is a good practice. Most of what hits the social web usually putters and falls into obscurity.

So when Google Buzz was announced, I didn’t give it much thought.

With any tool that I use, my main objective is:

1. To determine if it provides me value when it comes to sharing and communicating on the social web.
2. To determine if it’s just another way to broadcast my voice. If that’s the case, I probably won’t use it.
3. To be sure it provides value to the people who like what I share and listen to what I have to say. (most important to me)

Recently I’ve been trying to think of a way to share just the articles and resources I come across. I know some people set up a separate Twitter profile for this, but I was curious if there was another way to do this. So I thought about using Buzz. That way my friends who are already connected to me via Gmail can easily grab the information useful to them without having to dig through all my bookmarks or tweets.

I found a Firefox add-on called Buzz it! that works and is useful. It allows you to update your Buzz timeline through your Gmail. The update will include the title and the URL of the page you’re sharing. It also provides the option to edit the update and utilize Bit.ly to shorten your URLs, which I like.

I’ve just started playing with Buzz, so it remains to be seen if this will work.  Like all tools, it’s going to take some investment of time to determine if I’ll want to continue using it. I wrote off Twitter when I first  used it only to find its value the second time around.

Regardless, it’s probably not a good idea to constrain all my engagement to only one tool. Twitter has provided me tons of value and opportunities, but if it disappeared… well, then I’d better be sure I could find an adequate substitute.

Have you found any value using Google Buzz?