For those of you who have been living in a Google-proof shelter this week, Google introduced its latest toy, Buzz, this week. Superficially, Buzz operates a lot like Twitter, or like Facebook’s status page, in that you’re encouraged to share your fleeting thoughts with your crowd.

However, in my opinion, it so far has several significant advantages over either Twitter or Facebook. Enough so that it’s already looking like it might overtake both for me, personally, as my preferred source and sink of “short-form” communication. I also think that it scores big over Google’s other collaborative experiment, Wave.

Read on for my pros and cons… To be explicit, in each section, “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” below all are from Buzz’s point of view.

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Today on Twitter there’s a tag-meme, #10yearsago. It’s not all that unexpected, given that we’re coming up on another round-number year, but it has special significance to many, because, of course, in 2000, there was a chance that we were facing the End of the World as we Knew It™.

We were wrong, of course, but not far wrong. The disaster we all expected never came to pass, but 21 months later, a different chain of events really did sort of change the shape of our world rather significantly.

But I digress.

On the off chance that someone reading this was living on a desert island that year, or was simply too young to remember, here’s a quick summary of what was generally called the Y2K problem:

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