It’s always exciting to see a big company like Google launch a new product, such as today’s blast-off of Google Buzz. While it’s always nice to have another toy in the social sandbox to play with, today’s announcement sent the ShareThis offices atwitter for a different reason – it had the word “share” all over it. We’ve been like a broken record on this – sharing is the center of the social Web. It’s the crucial act in people’s online interactions, the way that conversations starts and where 90 percent of the value for businesses is. Today’s announcement was validation of all that we’ve been saying.

Look at the dominant media narrative’s coming out of today’s announcement: War! Google vs. Facebook vs. Twitter! And at the center of that war? Sharing. It truly is the connective tissue of the Web. We’re delighted that the big guys have finally figured this out.

Another encouraging element of Google’s announcement today is the company’s focus on cutting the signal-to-noise ratio of online content through sharing, something else we’ve long advocated. A person’s social graph is as effective of a filter for finding the good stuff as any tool or service can be and as applications move away from simply curating and aggregating content, they need to provide effective filtering. Sharing does this automatically.

Google Buzz is an amazing validation for both the act of sharing and the sharing economy, which we believe is huge. Apparently, so do Google, Facebook and Twitter, and we can’t be anything but ecstatic about that.

Tim
@schigel