Reid Dossinger

Posts

Showing posts with the label Google Buzz

Goodbye to Google Buzz, which had a lot of potential

Google announced today that they're going to be discontinuing Google Buzz. That probably won't come as a surprise to most people, who'll probably mostly be amazed that Buzz was still around, but for me, it's actually kind of a disappointment. Buzz had become pretty useful for me, mostly as a better interface for commenting on Google Reader's shared items. The thing is, Buzz could have done a whole lot more. That exact same idea (Reader shares, Twitter and blog incorporation, status messages) could have been implemented in gmail AND been given a separate space. You could have opted out in gmail, but still used the standalone site to interact and share. Their one big misstep was automatically adding friends rather than letting you build those from the ground up. If they had been more patient with it and started with a simple on/off privacy mode rather than trying to force everyone to use it with frustrating privacy settings, I think it could have succeeded. In sho...

Add any site to your Google Buzz feed

I was looking around for a way to do like those folks at Mashable did and create a Google profile page for The Org so that folks could follow us in Buzz. I wanted to attach our Wordpress site (which, by the way, is NOT a blog if anyone asks) so that it would update automatically, so I added it to the list of links on the profile. But when I clicked on "connected sites" in Buzz, the Wordpress site was, unsurprisingly, not in the list. After scouring the internet for clear instructions on how to add a Wordpress site to a Google profile so that it would feed into Buzz automatically, I finally came across these instructions . While they were useful, they were not the most clearly written instructions in the world, so I thought I'd simplify a little: Add your site to your Google Profile (Edit Profile > Links) Add in the following line of code to the <head> section of your website, replacing the link with the link to your public profile page: <link href="http:/...

How Google SHOULD Have Rolled Out Buzz

As much as I've tried to convince everyone I know not to use Google Buzz, I can't pull myself away. I'm too curious about stuff like this. But beyond the bone-headed privacy issues behind Buzz, it's just not a very good product. It's hard to know if it was rushed or just ill-conceived, but it was too much all at once with too few options. Here's how they should have done it: Start With Statuses ONLY Forget rolling in Reader, Picasa and Twitter: start only with the Twitter-like ability to post messages, with the ability to pull in your gchat status and the ability to comment or like. Yes, the web world would have yawned big at another Twitter clone. But this would have been the slow growth that Google needed for Buzz. It would have made the noise much quieter at first without that unread count going completely crazy, and the messages being sent to your inbox when you got a new comment would have been perfectly manageable. Most importantly, it would have eased the...

How Your Google Buzz (and Reader) Comments End Up Everywhere

While Google Buzz seemed like a perfectly logical and exciting next step for Google, one thing makes it totally worthless: the lack of privacy. You may think of it like Twitter, where you know that you can choose to post things privately or publicly. Or you may think of it like Google Reader, where your shared items are on a page with your comments. You may have already seen this article on the privacy flaw that allows people to see who you're following and who's following you (highly recommended if you haven't seen it). What you may not know is that your comments on any public posts end up on the poster's public profile . People who set up a profile for Buzz may not have their Buzz showing up on their profile, but anyone who has set up a public Google profile gets a "Buzz" tab on their profile, and all of your comments show up there on their public, searchable profile...with your first and last name. So in the screenshot above, my friend Doug has his commen...