3 Free Tips For Google: How to Make Buzz a Killer

Posted by schneidermike on Thursday, February 25, 2010 · View Comments 

Google Buzz has the potential to be THE ultimate social media dialogue and content aggregation machine. Here are three short-term ideas that will make it infinitely more usable and convert the skeptics.

Compact the Content

Problem: Showing the buzz and all the comments (even just 10 – and how are they decided?) is really noisy. Particularly when you follow people who get serious engagement like Jason Calacanis, Pete Cashmore and “Mr. Noisy” Robert Scoble. Users will decide when they want to read the comments. Result: more content is read. I do not see a decrease in engagement. The people who don’t like to read comments were not going to read them anyway.

buzz_redesign_page1

Filter Out Channels

Problem: Some people are still using multiple social media tools. They want to continue to use them for what they like to use them for and they are not coming to Buzz to have that content duplicated. OK. Let them remove the content they do not want to see. Caveat: They can’t remove Buzz original content.

Here’s a quick and easy way to remove the content you do not care about.

buzz_redegisn_page2

Clicking “Filter Channels Options” takes your to this screen that allows you to set options globally and also to change your mind if you decide you want the content back. (Yeah, I grabbed the channels from FriendFeed).

buzz_redesign_page3

Make Buzz Post to Twitter

That’s game over.

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  • skipbensley
    Interesting, not sure I like buzz but your additions help certainly.
  • I agree with all your thoughts here, Mike. I might be in the minority on this, but I'd like to see them add is a user-centric view which is basically an expansion of the Buzz user list you can see in Google Reader. I picture a sidebar with the list of all the users you follow, then you can click on any of them to expand and view their Buzz entries. This way I could briefly click into those noisy Scoble-like buzzers' streams to see if anything interests me, but focus most of my time on people I'm more closely connected with. Just my 2 cents...
  • Making the interface more compact would be a boon and your illustration is a step toward that. The "filter channels" can be set in the Google Profile pane, I think.. or in the "connected sites" link inside buzz. Buzz lets us define groups with which we share a post of our own. But filtering the actual nature/tags/content of posts by others would be a plus. When i "hide post" i am hoping that i am "hiding posts like these". Likewise, when i "like" a post, that action shouldn't affect only that particular post, but posts like it (based on tags/words in the topic, etc). At the moment, one is only given the option to "stop following" a user entirely, or continue following, and hide his posts as they come. Lastly, I switched off twitter to buzz. i'm unlikely to have buzz to twitter as the two media are entirely different audiences and purposes, IMHO. I DO want to post buzz to FB to try and draw my friends into buzz, though.
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