Within the glass-and-steel tower of its Mountainview, California, headquarters, engineers at Google have grown accustomed to a certain routine after their alma mater goes live with one of its funky new products. Grab a latte, plunk yourself down on a brightly colored beanbag, and casually high-five your colleagues while another knocks out a victory tune on the baby grand piano in the corner.

There has been little music at the Googleplex in the last week, however. Instead, the world’s most loved company has found itself in a rare position: having to vociferously defend and constantly modify its latest product rollout.

For its legions of fans, Google Buzz was meant to be the search-engine giant’s welcome answer to Facebook. Instead, it was greeted with abject hostility as Gmail users found their most frequent contacts “outed” to the rest of the world by Google’s engineers. One blogger complained that she had been reconnected to her abusive ex-husband. Elsewhere, others were complaining of spam attacks on their inboxes. Somewhere, the viral loop had short-circuited, causing some Internet watchers to question just how secure Google’s market leadership really is.

Ironically, Google’s greatest faux pas with Buzz was in marketing, an area that is usually a source of strength. “The biggest problem with Buzz was in selling it so hard and opening it up so fast. It’s in direct contrast to Gmail, which they kept exclusive for a while. When that first came out, you could find people selling Gmail invites on eBay,” said David Berkowitz, a director of digital marketing firm 360i in New York, in an interview.

What Google should have done, Berkowitz said, was stick to its normal modus operandi: Put the product in Labs, let people play with it, and let it become big all by itself. Why then did the firm that claims that “you can make money without doing evil” suddenly join ranks with all the other big U.S. conglomerate marketing suits?

One answer may lie in Google’s inability to grasp the subtle difference between search and social networking. In the same way that Microsoft assumed that by jamming instant-messaging systems and browsers onto the hard drives of PCs, it would become an overnight leader in the online space, so Google assumed that if it applied its aggregation technology to people’s email inboxes they would have no reason to look further than their Gmail accounts in order to connect with family and friends.

But while consumers love their data aggregated, they apparently hate it when you aggregate their social lives. Worse still, the unwelcome intrusion was concentrated among Google’s core customer base.

“One of the striking things with Google Buzz is that it didn’t even learn from some of the basic things from other social-networking sites like Twitter,” said i360’s Berkowitz. “It’s a very funny paradox where Buzz is open to all Gmail users, but at the same time it’s so centrally attached to Gmail so it’s not as appealing to anyone else who doesn’t have an account.”

The parallels between Microsoft’s foray into the online world and Google’s attempt to steal its slice of the social-networking pie don’t end there. Just as Microsoft was once trumped by upstart Google, with its clean blank search pages and lightening-speed algorithms, so Google finds itself increasingly threatened by Facebook’s cozy community design.

A recent study by online researcher Compete found that Facebook directed twice the amount of traffic as Google did to online portals such as Yahoo and AOL. Even more worrying for Google is the astronomical growth in Facebook’s traffic numbers in general.

According to Compete’s most recent study, in January of this year Facebook overtook Yahoo’s traffic for the first time, putting it in second place behind Google. In January, Facebook received just over 133.5 million unique visitors in North America versus Google’s 147.8 million. In the same month a year ago, Facebook claimed just half Google’s traffic numbers, with 68.6 million unique visitors, compared with 136.7 for Google. The statistics take into account all of Google’s applications, including search, Gmail, and Google Finance.

Further, the latest data from researcher Nielsen show that those visitors spend more than three times as long on Facebook per month as they do on any of Google’s sites. In January the average user spent two hours using Google and seven hours on Facebook. In addition, the data show that while Google users are spending 15 percent less time with the brand, while Facebook fans spent 10 percent more time hanging out writing on their friends’ walls.