Bizarro World: Where Facebook is Gmail, Gmail is Twitter

By now, you may have heard the news, Google, via their Gmail product, is planning a Twitter-like status-sharing feature. Previously, one could leave a status message but that message would disappear when a person updated or deleted it. In the NEW Gmail, this feature would aggregate the updates into a Twitter-like stream of consciousness.

You may have heard this story before.

This is, by my count, the sixth foray into the social networking space by Google, with the update aggregator joining Orkut, Latitude, Open Social, Friend Connect and the uber-ignored Google Wave.

This of course comes on the heels of (another) Facebook redesign and rumored “full featured webmail” called Project Titan.

Both Facebook and the GOOG want to become the epicenter of your searches, updates, stalking and image uploads (remember Picasa?). Both want you to never, ever leave their signed-in walled gardens. The longer you stay, the more impressions their advertisers receive and the more fine-tuned their search and advertising algorithm becomes.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer using Facebook, Twitter and Gmail separately as all three reach separate and distinct audiences. I cannot stand when “social media gurus” tie a combination of social sites together, spamming me about their life coaching tips on multiple sites.

Let us know what you think in the comments (or on Twitter). We’ll be happy to serve up screen shots and testing of Google’s latest when it goes live.