What will probably strike your mind when people say “social networking” site?. I’m pretty sure, most of you will utter the word Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or Friendster. Considering the fact that social networking sites has emerged as one of the most popular application in the Internet, I have this thought few years back why Google – one of the big name in the cyber world is not reacting to this phenomena.

But yesterday, Google has rolled out BUZZ, a social networking feature in a form of tool for its Gmail service which will allow users to share favourite links, photos, videos as well as status updates, in similar ways as they do in Facebook and other social networking sites.

Google’s success will be determined by how well they could convince Gmail users to move their social networking tasks over to Buzz. The search engine giant offers significant improvements over exisiting social networks. Buzz has been designed to assist users deal with the massive amount of information they receive through their social networking sites.

Google opted to build Buzz into Gmail because Gmail contacts lists are an underlying, existing social graph for users, officials said. Buzz is designed to offer a complete set of features which allow users to stay connected with their friends right from their Gmail inbox.

But Google’s prior record on social network is quite bad. Their Orkut has failed to gain users attention from other popular sites. Only time will tell whether they will succeed. You may test drive Buzz by login to http://www.google.com/buzz and enter your Gmail credential. If you don’t see anything different, you may need to check back soon as it is rolled out phase by phase.