“A Google approach to sharing,” Buzz is designed to, in the words of Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management, “find the signal in the social networking noise.”

The service exists within Gmail and promises to bring the social network that Google (GOOG) says always existed beneath the email service to the surface.

“The stream of social messages has become a torrent,” said Horowitz. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Hence, Buzz.

Buzz taps into the torrent via the sort of feature set you’d expect: auto-following, which turns Gmail contact lists into social networks (which seems to me a horrifically bad idea; Like most folks, I imagine I have quite a few contacts I absolutely do NOT want to included in my social network); public and private sharing options; support of the “@ reply” feature popularized by Twitter; and a feature called “Recommended Buzz” that allows users to endorse updates they enjoy. The service also strives to make it easy to enhance those updates with content from other sites–Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and, yes, Twitter (no Facebook, though–yet).

Buzz, which launches Tuesday, is closely tied to Google’s mobile ambitions. It will debut in concert with a Web app for Android and iPhone and an enhancement to Google Maps for Mobile that will use GPS data to associate public Buzz content posted from mobile phones with location.

Google is the latest search company to try to graft social-networking features onto email service. Yahoo did it last year by adding “status casting,” its variation on Twitter, to Yahoo Mail. That feature has been mostly ignored since its debut. Perhaps Google’s effort will fare a bit better. It is, perhaps, the one company with enough heft and market power to reasonably take on Facebook. But it won’t be easy: Facebook has some 400 million unique users. Gmail, about 176 million.

Still, embrace and extend. Embrace and extend.

According to NPD Group’s latest Mobile Phone Track study, price cuts on devices like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and RIM’s (RIMM) Blackberry Curve inspired a three percent decline in the average price for all cellphones in the third quarter of 2009. The overall average purchase price for mobile phones in the U.S. for the period: $85. A year ago it was $88.

An interesting trend given the fast-advancing feature sets and presumably high development costs of the new state-of-the-art smartphones we’re carrying around these days. For while these lower prices mean more sales for smartphone manufacturers and more subscribers for their carrier partners in the short term, they may well be undermining the smartphone’s price potential in the long term. It’s hard not to see the $299.99 Palm (PALM) Pixi for $24.99 on Amazon (AMZN) or the $499.99 Droid Eris for $49.99 on Overstock (OSTK) as having some deflationary impact once those retailers are done with them.

“That impact will continue,” NPD analyst Ross Rubin told me. “The iPhone 3G at $99 has created a benchmark that competitors are responding to with handsets such as the Droid Eris and Palm. Even where a handset is competing closer to the $200 mark, carriers and retailers are using buy-one-get-one promotions (that help lock in family plans). And retailers are discounting even value-priced smartphones further to drive store traffic and accessory sales.”

Rubin’s conclusion: “We will soon reach the point where the handset is a minor expense consideration and the required monthly data fees become the limiting factor in smartphone adoption.”

And by many accounts, Windows 7 is poised to do just that. Unlike Vista, it was completed on time. And unlike Vista, early reviews have been positive.

“Even in beta form, with some features incomplete or imperfect, Windows 7 is, in my view, much better than Vista, whose sluggishness, annoying nag screens, and incompatibilities have caused many users to shun it,” Walt Mossberg said of the OS back in January. “It’s also a serious competitor, in features and ease of use, for Apple’s current Leopard operating system.”

So Microsoft (MSFT) has good reason to be proud of this release-to-manufacturing, or RTM, milestone. There’s a lot riding on Windows. And the company seems to be very much on point as it brings the newest version to market.

“Today’s release is the result of hard work and collaboration with our partners in the industry to make Windows 7 a success,” wrote Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc in a post to the Windows 7 Team Blog. “We delivered Windows 7 with a predictable feature set on a predictable timetable that allowed OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to focus on value and differentiation for their customers. We continue to be overwhelmed at the community’s response to Windows 7 and it has been an extremely rewarding experience to witness. We hope the enthusiasm will continue to grow even more as our partners build amazing experiences with their products and Windows 7.”

Ironically, this particular build of Windows 7–Build 7600.16385–which Microsoft designated as RTM, was leaked to the Internet nearly a week ago and has been available for download via BitTorrent ever since.

Apple’s (AAPL) plan to preview iPhone OS 3.0 tomorrow is a sure sign that the company is on track to debut the next iteration of the phone on which it will run this summer. That’s the word from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who has high expectations for the OS and device both. “In the past two weeks Apple has introduced new Mac hardware and a new iPod shuffle, for which the company simply issued a press release,” Munster wrote in a research note. “The fact that Apple is hosting an event for the iPhone OS 3.0 shows that it will likely involve meaningful changes to the iPhone feature set. Apple may be settling into an annual summer hardware refresh cycle with the iPhone, similar to the iPod’s fall refresh cycle.”

Just what does Munster mean by “meaningful changes”? Like others, he anticipates the addition of universal search, background processing/multitasking and the long pined-for cut and paste.

Incidentally, Munster says he doesn’t expect Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is on medical leave from the company until June, to attend tomorrow’s event. Tim Cook will be filling the Jobs role for the time being, he says–as much as possible, anyway. Said Munster, “During Jobs’ absence, the pace of innovation at Apple has continued, which we believe will reassure investors. Increasingly, we believe investors are considering the future of Apple under Cook’s leadership as a positive.”