Back in February, techies had mixed reactions to Google Buzz, the Gmail-integrated "Twitter killer" that hijacked inboxes across the country. After disabusing the public from knee-jerk fears of privacy invasions, bloggers mostly deemed Google Buzz a pesky (and essentially useless) cousin of popular social media tools.

Months later, tech blogger Richard Scoble wonders if it's time to reconsider the battle between Google Buzz and social media monsters like Facebook and Twitter. " Google got a lot of bad PR because when you setup that service it shared your social graph publicly...For a while it seemed like the service was going to be a ghost town," writes Scoble on his blog, Scobleizer. "But lately it’s been coming back. I’m getting more engagement on my items there than on Twitter or Facebook." Scoble takes a fresh look at the pros and cons of Google Buzz:

Google has been consistently adding features. It now is pretty close to matching FriendFeed (or it will be after they ship a few features I’ve been given early access to)...The community is great. I see a lot of great photography. Great discussions of news stories. And great conversations about tech. You only have to see my iPhone vs. Sprint EVO thread to see the value there. The team is visible. There’s a Google Buzz page for the team, they are interacting with us on the site and in public (especially true at the Google IO conference, which makes sense). The mobile features, especially on Android, are way ahead of other social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Google has not yet deleted anyone’s accounts or punished people unfairly the way Twitter or Facebook have.

"Google Buzz has — for me — been getting better,' concludes Scoble. "Is it a Twitter or Facebook killer yet? No way. But if it keeps being updated I can see an interesting world taking shape here and, certainly, one that brands and geeks should certainly be putting into their media mix."

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