Google recently rolled out their offering to the social media landscape, Buzz. If you’ve already been using Gmail and the Google App system (Documents, Calendar, etc), then you’ve no doubt noticed, as they’ve deployed it to everyone’s Gmail already (or at least they are in the process, if you haven’t seen it yet, you will). You will be prompted to add it to your inbox as soon as you log in.

At first, Buzz looks just like Facebook or any of the other major micro-blog style sites that let you post status updates and connect with friends, but don’t let its obvious functionality trick you. At it’s core, Google Buzz is another game changer.

At the root of the issue is the idea of closed, proprietary systems versus open standards. Non-techies might consider this a semantic infight amongst programmers, but it has real world consequences for users of the technologies involved. Google Buzz, as opposed to Facebook, is building it’s social stream based on multiple open standards. Also taking into account the scope of the rest of Google’s application offerings and infrastructure, I think this gives Google Buzz the potential to rapidly become a dominant force in the social media landscape. This makes it important to you.

To elaborate the concept, take Myspace as an example. As a closed system, Myspace actively attempted to prevent third party developers from creating functionality for their system. Facebook took the opposite approach and created an openly accessible system that invited independent programmers to build applications that interrelated with the Facebook platform. The result was a flood of users leaving Myspace and joining Facebook as Facebook’s functionality increased exponentially.

While Facebook did open their doors to outside development, they still own the house. If Facebook were to decide tomorrow that they wanted to change a major element of their code, thousands of applications may break and there could be many repercussions for people who rely on those apps. Especially with the way social media has shifted the paradigm of how we communicate with each other, having so much control in privately owned hands is a potentially dangerous situation.

Google Buzz is the next evolution of that concept of openness. Buzz operates on open standards, the software equivalent of democracy in code. With open standards, independent bodies and organizations agree on an accepted set of rules for the way a system operates. Any companies who are interested in building software based on that open standard are insulated from having to worry about an arbitrary company policy change wiping out months of development. Users are safe from the fear their data could be deleted. Readers and consumers are safe from the fear that at some future date, the data they’re attempting to access will be archived in a format that is no longer readable.

What does this mean to us in real estate? Well, most importantly, it could signal the end of agents having to dance between so many social networks. It can easily become a full time job updating your Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Zillow, Trulia, LinkedIn plus your myriad blogs and your old fashioned email inbox. If all of these sites adopted the practice of using open standards to drive their data streams, an update to one would mirror across all platforms.

Not only would it be easier to post information to the cloud, it would also be easier to search through and access information from it. This has special significance for an industry that’s so reliant on data flow, like real estate. It’s not so far in the distance when public record data, listing information and all other manner of information will be accessible from a single source.

However, it’s also worth noting that the real estate industry has traditionally profited heavily from the fact that certain information is difficult to access. The MLS for example is a serious resource that, in the past, an agent had access to that the average public did not. This gave the agent a unique selling position in the minds of their clients, as they could both pull properties off the MLS for buyers and post properties onto the MLS for sellers. With systems like Zillow now overtaking Realtor.com in traffic, it’s only a matter of internet moments before the MLS as we know it changes fully over to a ubiquitously accessible data stream like everything else. Actually, Google has their sights on that already as well, with the coming addition of properties for sale to the Google Maps system (I’ll cover this in a future article).

The old world is gone and a new one is dawning.

Looking forward into the future, any attempts at restricting data flow or enclosing information in privately owned, proprietary systems is destined to fail. Fighting this information evolution is futile for companies and deadly for users who hope to profit from social networks.

In summary, don’t write off Buzz as another profile that you can forego. Separate from all the ideas I covered in this post, there’s also the assumed advantage of Google giving prominent rankings to profiles and conversations posted to Buzz in search engine listings. Don’t ignore this one.

What do you think Google Buzz means for the social media ecosystem?