Today marks the end of an extremely awkward chapter in the life of Google, the overlords of the Internet. Today, Google announced that they are finally killing Google Buzz. The move to end Buzz comes as Google+ enters the field as a real power and as the search giant has begun pruning off many of its side projects.

When it was originally launched, Google Buzz was meant to be the search giant’s first foray into social networking. Its aim was to allow users to quickly and easily share their activity, and place it prominently on the main Gmail page. However, the service was far too overreaching, leading to an uproar that ended with the service becoming a wasteland, and Google in hot water with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

For the six of you that still use the service, Google says you’ll be able to pull down a copy of your data using Google Takeout.

Eric Schmidt may not be Google’s CEO anymore now that Larry Page is in the saddle, but Schmidt, currently the executive chairman of the search company, clearly still views Google through a leader’s eye — and that includes the company’s screwups.

Speaking at the D9 conference, Schmidt opened up about Google’s poor showing in social media, which has given rise to criticism as failures like Orkut, Wave, and Buzz have piled up. When asked what his greatest regret was as CEO of the company this is what he pointed to:

Tellingly, Schmidt said the social problem Google is grappling with today is largely his fault. He said he recently looked up memos he wrote four years ago about Google needing to address online identity. “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”

Though Facebook has emerged as a bitter rival to Google in winning ad dollars, top engineers, and hearts and minds, with dirty tactics not out of the question, Schmidt praised Facebook for its role in de-anonymizing the Internet: “[Facebook is] the first generally available way of disambiguating identity. Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn’t be owned by a single company. I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that….Identity is incredibly useful because in the online world you need to know who you are dealing with.”

(AllThingsD via CNET)

If you use Gmail and happen to click your way to your Google Buzz tomorrow, it will ask you to review your privacy settings. Don’t panic! This is normal. Or at least it will be tomorrow.

In response to widespread concerns over the privacy of Buzz, Google is going to ask users to review and confirm their privacy settings, so that everyone can see the changes they’ve made to the interface.

We’ve been meaning to mention Please Rob Me, the site that aggregates publicly available, geolocated Twitter messages of the “I am at X bar” variety, as passed on by Google Buzz and Foursquare, uses them to determine who is and isn’t at their homes, and passes on all of the empty house “opportunities” that are ripe for the robbing.

Well: Please Rob Me exists, and it is scary:

Just a week after its launch, Google Buzz is already being inundated with spam, web security outfit Websense reports.

After a mere two days, the company detected Buzzing spammers (or spamming Buzzers, take your pick): “in an indictment of how rapidly spammers are learning to abuse social networks, it took only two days before they started to hit Google Buzz.”

When the public reaction to Google Buzz took a fast negative turn, the company made swift changes to alleviate privacy concerns surrounding the service’s automatic tendency to share information.

But now, Google may be taking an even more drastic step: One of Google’s top executives has said that the company may be splitting Buzz apart from Google, making it a standalone service that can still integrate into Gmail:

After yesterday’s revelation of Google Buzz, one of the big questions that people are asking this morning is “how do I turn off Google Buzz, exactly?” Or, in cutesier language, “how do I unBuzz?”

Even though Google is roping the 176 million+ Gmail accounts into their great social experiment, they’re not evil (that’s their motto, after all), and while the off switch isn’t staring you in the face, it’s fairly painless to turn Google Buzz off:

As you’ve no doubt heard, Google signaled its move into the social media arena in a big way at 10am PST today by announcing the launch of Google Buzz, a Gmail-integrated social networking utility which will roll out over the next few days.

So: what is Google Buzz, exactly? Below, ten things that define what it is — and what it isn’t: