George Hall Online

Exploring Social Media, Tech And Gadgets

Google Buzz Ketchup (Kiwi Joke There)

The title for this post should be "Google Buzz Catchup, but I thought it a better thing to say that with a New Zealand accent.

Since I've taken a three-week vacation from social media, it's time for me to catch up with the latest on Buzz and see what I've been missing while I rested.

There's still lots of talk about the privacy issues surrounding Buzz, as shown here.

Then there's some discussion on whether Buzz should have been labelled as a beta product by Google.  Other discussion centers on whether it should be for aggregation or publishing.

Apparently there's now an iPhone app called Buzzie available, though the screenshot in this article seems to indicate it's not much different from the mobile Buzz page.  I'll have to download the app to get a better idea.

GoogleBuzz is a website of Buzz news, so it's a good starting place for new information and one I'm going to be bookmarking.

Finally, to feature improvement.  Latest work by Google now solves the noise in your Gmail/Buzz inbox.

Be that as it may...for all this, today came the news that FACEBOOK is now a more popular destination on the Web than Google.  Shock horror.

There's a lesson in that, Google.

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Ease of Use

I don't mind gadgets or OSes that have some built-in difficulty, just so long as they're intuitive to work out.

However, I still have memories of trying to get a Windows PocketPC 2002 phone working to access the Internet and having to use a non-intuitive method of doing so.  Other phones of the time weren't as hard to set up for the same task.  Sure, you had to have a rudimentary understanding of how they achieved it, but once learnt, it was intuitive.  Not so, back then, on a Windows phone.

When I'm talking to Windows pundits, it's a favorite example to bring up to show some things Windows aren't as "user-friendly" as they're made out to be.

Of course, this week I'm bitching about how unintuitive it is to sort power-users in Google Buzz into some form of filter and/or label.

The easiest and most intuitive thing I can manage there is to get buzzes out of my inbox and into a "My Discussions" label.  What's not intuitive is being able to put buzzes from Robert Scoble, Mashable, Techcrunch and Louis Gray into a "power-buzzes" label.  I think I've tried multiple variations of their names and even moused over their profile names to find their google name to input into the "from" box in the filter.  No dice.  Instead of going to their own separate label, they're still showing up in the main Buzz label.  The Google Help files in this case could be more...helpful.

There's no way inside a buzz to just checkbox these names into a label.  Now THAT would have been the INTUITIVE way to do it.

It doesn't mean you're stupid if you want a way that helps you understand and do intuitively.  The word "intuit" means you're able to figure it out in some logical, sensible fashion.

I sit there in the meantime getting frustrated with a non-intuitive way to sort things and have to waste valuable time trying to track down a solution instead of writing.

Let me know if you have similar frustrations with devices and/or programs that are counter-intuitive.

Blogging The Buzz...

Google's Buzz is up and running.

The beauty of Buzz is that Friendfeed's fans will feel at home with it.

In essence, if someone like Robert Scoble puts an update out over buzz, as they did over at Friendfeed with him, his contacts can have a whole conversation from that point on.

Where it differs from Friendfeed is that it's integrated into your Gmail account.

So if you've already got some friends via the Gmail address book, you already have a starter group to "buzz."  Not just that, think of the size of the user base.

You can share privately or publicly.  You can use photos with it.  You can import from Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader.  Plus, you already have a spam filter.

At the moment my laptop's access to Google hasn't received the update to buzz, whereas my iPhone can access buzz via the mobile Buzz site.

I have to admit, it's renewed some enthusiasm for Google stuff.  My contacts on Google Reader are small compared to my Twitter account.

And it's faster by far than Google Wave.

While I like Wave, Buzz is a lot closer to where I think Wave should be.  I daresay that will be clearly demonstrated in the next few weeks.  I also think former and current Friendfeed users will be at the forefront of using Buzz to do a better job than Wave.

Perhaps that'll spur the Wave developers to move forward with some much-needed changes.

Of course, Wave and Buzz are both horses in the same Google stable, so it's no real problem.

General verdict on Buzz?  Out of ten?  Very nearly a ten.

At least until I see how much bandwidth it chews up...

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