By now, you may have heard the news about Google Buzz:

How do you feel about a content curating algorithm? Shouldn’t relationships dictate what we pay attention to online?

In December 2008, David Armano wrote a blog post about the “human feed“. Essentially, he argues that the Twitter platform allows trusted sources to curate content to one another, eliminating the need to search for it.

With the sheer amount of noise on the web, Twitter is extremely useful in terms of an idea exchange– networking with like minded people and tapping into their knowledge base.

Twitter is an awesome way to discover your blogger’s favorite blogger, or your favorite journalist’s most trusted and valuable source.

But with marketers, advertisers and self-promoters dominating Twitter, it becomes more difficult to differentiate the signal from the noise. This would be an easy fix if it was solely about shifting through an immense volume of information, unfortunately, this information is also splintered on different social media sites across the web. As social media has become the media — everyone who shares anything online has become an advertiser, marketer, creative, and journalist.

So in today’s world where we all are creators how do you shift through the noise? It becomes a job on its own. The smartest people around, at least in my industry, are the one’s who share the best content.

I have found some amazing content curators on Twitter in particular: People like Bud Caddell, David Teicher or Len Kendall. I learn so much from the content they share daily. In a sense, they are my human feed. But it took me months to find them.

For me, the concept of the human feed only worked because I put in an immense amount of time an effort to discover people who offered value.

When it takes months of searching and interacting just to find who shares the most valuable content on a social network? It is time to find a better way. If you asked someone like me how to find influencers in a certain industry using social media they’d list off things like twitter lists, tweepml, alltop, and klout. Guess what? Google can do it better:  Enter Google Buzz:

1) Google is attempting to rank your social graph:

The social graph that is filled out most competely and accurately for people? It’s not facebook, it’s email.

Based on your existing email connections and what is interesting to those around you, they are recommending and ranking content. If you email your girlfriend 100 times a day, based on this information, an update about what she had for breakfast with no comments  may show up right below a Jezebel article about Taylor Swift with 50 comments that was shared by your old friend from college.

2) Google is recognizing that the next phase of social lies in filtering and measurement:

Google dominates search because it helps you find what is relevant in a way that is timely and simple. They are going to dominate social with the same principles — they will aggregate your streams and make social data relevant to each individual user.

Google analytics is arguably the best website measurement tool out there. All you measurement folks out there, think about the power of Google analytics when Google Buzz is integrated. Is this the Social media measurement tool that we have all been pining for? Possibly.

I realize that Google Buzz isn’t perfect. You can talk about why it’s going to fail in the comments. All that aside,  the main ideas behind Google Buzz: Filtering, Relevancy, and Measurement are they very same values that allowed Google to win the search war, and may lead Google to social domination.

What do you think? Have we moved beyond the human feed? Do we need help finding relevant content in the social stream as it is right now?

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