Google Wave and Google Buzz certainly have an awful lot in common. Wave was billed as a reinvention of e-mail, a way for individuals and corporate employees to share ideas, media, and conversation in a more intuitive format than e-mail. Buzz was billed as a similar type of social-media tool that allows for the sharing of ideas and discussion among a network.

Although it did launch an extensions feature on Friday, the Google Wave team has been very quiet since Google launched Buzz. Last year the Google Wave team said it intended to bring Google Wave into the Google Apps suite at some point in 2010, but the Google Buzz team has a comparable plan in mind for this year, and has the advantage of being borne of the same team that created Gmail, the Google Apps linchpin.

The manner in which they were each introduced to the public was very different. Wave emerged as an invitation-only service for months before opening up to a wider audience in September. By contrast, Google Buzz was available to any Gmail user upon its launch in February. The Google Buzz team admitted they took a cue from the anemic debut of Wave and adopted the auto-follower strategy that accompanied its launch, giving Buzz users a ready-made social network of their most frequently e-mailed Gmail contacts.

The Wave team just added a feature that lets Wave users get an e-mail when their Wave inbox has been updated, meaning that while the Mountain View-based Buzz team and Sydney, Australia-based Wave team aren’t necessarily in direct competition, they are certainly eyeing each other’s work.

Wave is reportedly designed around making users more productive in their work lives as a collaboration tool, while Buzz is more about “social sharing and passive sharing with people who are interested in what you think. With Buzz only a month old, and Google Wave not scheduled to open to the general public before the end of June, there’s still plenty of time for Google’s budding social-networking group to figure out how to build out the projects over the long term and how they should live together.

There’s talk that a merger might be in the works at some point, but to outsiders, the company looks like it’s flailing about in search of anything that will stick. Insiders see Google’s insistence on semi-autonomous teams that are encouraged to follow their muse as the most effective way of generating innovation at such a large company, Rasmussen said. That includes not worrying about how the project at hand will affect other ongoing projects.

Google is obsessed with innovation and it’s hard to imagine that a project like Wave, which the company chose to announce on its biggest stage of the year in 2009, can be eclipsed by a successor in less than a year, and before it has even opened to the general public.