I haven’t been able to try Google Buzz yet but here are some more thoughts from the outside looking in.

The decision to use GMail as the platform to establish a foothold within social media is smart – probably the second best thing Google could have done aside from buying Twitter. The idea of creating a service within something that 175 million people use each month makes total sense.

Google Buzz also scores points with a nice suite of features so it can be used to provide links to other social media platforms – something will expand down the road. Being able to create mini-Web sites from each update is also interesting.

That said, Google Buzz faces some major challenges. Perhaps the biggest is how willing people will be embrace yet another social media service when many people are already using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, etc.

Once someone has their social media “tool box”, it can be difficult to squeeze in another tool – even if it has some utility. It’s the reason, for example, that I have resisted multiple invitations to join Plaxo. While I’ve heard good things about Plaxo, I don’t have the appetite or interest in using it because it would just be yet another tool.

Google Buzz could face the same challenge trying to establish a foothold beyond bleeding-edge users. Its adoption could come down to whether it proves itself to be more useful and user-friendly so it starts to replace other tools – Facebook, Twitter, etc. in digital tool boxes.