Agreed, it won't really work outside of Gmail. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. It really needs clear privacy settings, clear demarcation of email contacts and social contacts (with the option for contacts to be in both).
I love Buzz (and Reader). Wave was oversold and seems just like realtime message boarding. There is an intense amount of hate being generated for Buzz. <anecdotal>It seems a lot of people seem to dislike the intrusion into Gmail, maybe.</anecdotal>
No, there are different games for different people. There are distinct genres as well as games targeted at specific demographic segments (e.g. tween girls).
Winer and the majority (all?) of those commenting act as if Gmail has been this walled-off pristine email client. WRONG. There is chat, RSS feeds, SMS, Calendar, Docs, Location and iGoogle gadgets, etc all bundled up in Gmail if you want them. It has never been just about email and might as well absorb status updates and Wave-isms. These people sound just like users complaining about every little change with Facebook.
Interesting service and I agree with most of what's been said here. I have to reiterate the naming choice - it really does make me think of "faux", which would in turn cause me to hesitate passing out the URL to show my resume.
Agreed, it's really the repetition that is somewhat annoying. Announce/launch days can be doubly annoying. The truth is, there's only so much to their products - especially the 'locked down' ones - that we don't really need THAT much information, speculation and punditry.
The tools are also not there yet. In order for HTML5 to really gain momentum there needs to be a set of tools that are as easy to create with as Flash.
This experiment is definitely worthy of a post. I haven't looked at how he did that or the "CSS Bird" shadow effect but I'm impressed that can be done without Javascript.