Google Buzz a Step Forward to Google Wave?

Today many people that will open their gmail will be faced with the dialog about Google buzz. This is a new service from Google that in a sense makes your gmail inbox into twitter like account. But it is more than twitter like account. It includes conversations and embeddings from other sites like Picasa, Flickr, Youtube etc...

The interesting question marks that raised in my head are:

1. Is Google trying to compete with huge success of Twitter? (They are not trying to compete per se, they want the realtime information that's available on Twitter and is not (yet???) available to Google.
2. Is this a step forward to Google Wave?

Maybe it's actually both 1 and 2 and something else that we can not yet see in the big picture :)

Google Buzz is also available on Mobile:

And here's the announcement of Google Buzz on the official Google blog