Google Buzz just launched today and one of the most interesting product decisions the Google team made was that on sign-up, you automatically follow people who you email and chat with the most.   This is very different than how most social apps operate.  On foursquare, you search for a friend-> manual follow your friend  -> your  friend then approves.  Gowalla works in a similar way and so does 100s of other social apps, including the largest one of them all, Facebook.

I find it personally frustrating that every single time I use a new app, I have to find friends, ask them to join the app, then they have to approve, and so forth.  If Facebook is my defacto social graph, why can’t the auto-follow model work?

But maybe there is something more to this.

While it might be more convenient to have an auto-follow feature, there are two inherent flaws:

• Just because you email/chat with people in your address book doesn’t mean you want to follow everything they say. This holds true for Plancast, Foursquare, Gowalla, and who knows what else.  Just because you email someone a lot doesn’t mean you care what they are planning to do (ie Plancast).  I think in MOST cases (which Google is betting on), you probably do care what they have to say, but maybe it’s the edge cases for why the model won’t work.
• Search ->Manual Follow->Approve is necessary for a service to take off. The fact that I get an email when someone wants to be my friend on Foursquare reminds me that the service exists.  It bring me back to the app.  Or the fact that someone subscribes to the things I have planned to do, makes me feel that someone cares about what I have planned. These social nuances make me want to use the service more and more.

Maybe auto-follow with the ability to “unfollow” is the way to go OR maybe Google is just using it to seed the service with the intent that the ability to manually follow people will be the method of the future, it’s still too early to tell, but other social service apps have taken off for a reason.  Maybe…just maybe Google should learn something from that or are they just smarter than us?