Image by Oversocialized via Flickr

Google makes money by being your information middleman and serving ads along the way. The search page is the universal home page, and so long as that search page is Google’s, they’ll continue to print obscene gobs of money. So what does this have to do with the “slow motion train wreck” that is Google Buzz, the new FriendFeed clone that Google tacked onto Gmail mere days ago? It’s all in how you connect the dots.

Facebook is doing a bang-up job displacing Google as the universal home page, to the point that Facebook basically owns social page referrals, which is to say links that were recommended by friends, rather than search engines. If social referrals start to rival basic search in volume, Facebook could outflank Google. This problem will probably only get worse for Google as MS Outlook becomes the “social hub” of MS Office, drawing in LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook data for the old fogeys who don’t use Web mail. (Moreover, Facebook is moving aggressively into mobile — the same mobile space Google wants Android to own, despite a huge rival in Apple’s iPhone — which means Google could get outflanked on two fronts by Team Zuckerberg.)

The answer? Google needed its own social referral engine, and shared links on Google Reader weren’t good enough. Enter Google Buzz, a redo of the FriendFeed service that Facebook bought not so long ago.

That’s all fine and good, except for two problems. First, Google hates user configuration; it wants to pre-optimize your experience by tuning it with what it already knows about you. This usually means using your Gmail contacts to connect you to whatever new service they roll out. For Google Buzz, this meant that millions of Gmail users were now automatically publishing their contact lists to millions of other Gmail users, which could be a big deal if you had confidential sources or clients that other people really shouldn’t (ethically, legally, or socially) know about. Reporters, lawyers, doctors and philanderers were all severely put out.

This might seem an obvious flaw that should have been caught in user testing, except for our second problem: Google rushed Buzz to market without subjecting it to standard user testing.

Google users screamed about the privacy problem, and Google had a fix rolled out in days — though not fast enough to avoid some government investigations of privacy violations. (Don’t laugh; Canada takes that stuff seriously.)

Google is fighting a pitched battle with Facebook and Apple. The stakes are getting higher, which means time-to-market for new Google, Facebook, and Apple services is going to get shorter. It also means the temptation to shoehorn a new feature into an old one — like Google did by trying to springboard Buzz by sucking in 175 million Gmail users — is going to be an ever more tempting tactic. TechCrunch lists the long and sordid history of “force-feeding” users new Web services – Facebook, AOL and Yahoo all appear on the list.

To paraphrase Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Possibly to you.

At some point, this trend is going to result in a huge data exposure or, worse, a huge data loss for a major, brand-name Web service. Don’t be surprised when it comes down the pike, and don’t be without a backup plan.

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