So, just when you thought you were already overwhelmed with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along comes yet another social networking/sharing service.
Google Buzz has joined the party.
There’s already lots of rants floating around about why it’s awesome or why it’s great, but I’m going to talk specifically about what should be improved with it. To be perfectly honest though, I do like the idea of having a social networking tool integrated into Gmail, since I already use it for all my email as well as chat. Plus, the Gmail search feature is wicked-cool and will undoubtedly be useful with Buzz.
Confusing Privacy Features
Most people want to be able to manually approve each follower, rather than having them auto-follow. However, they don’t realize that Google Buzz is integrated with your public Google Profile. So this means whatever you post in Buzz as “public” can be viewed by ANYONE on the internet via your Google Profile page. Therefore it doesn’t matter if people have chosen to follow you or not. If you are concerned about the privacy of a post, simply choose “Private” and optionally post to a “group” of Gmail contacts.
No Way To Tell Which Post is New
It’s nice that there’s an indication near the Buzz logo in your Gmail menu of how many new Buzz posts there are, however once you get into Buzz there’s no way to know which posts are the new ones. So you’re stuck reading through a lot of what you’ve already read. Definitely a time-waster.
No Tags / Keywords / Categories
These would be very handy to help search and organize our Buzz’s.
Can’t Include an Image in a Comment
When you create your own post there’s a useful link to insert a photo from your computer. However, this isn’t possible when commenting on your friend’s posts. There’s been a few times I wanted to include a pic in my comment but wasn’t able to.
Re-Buzz?
Similar to a Twitter Re-Tweet, it would be cool to be able to send a Buzz from one of your contacts along to your other contacts.
That’s about it for now. Does anyone have other ideas?
