A Few More Things You Should Know About Buzz
February 10, 2010 - By
Justin E. Gehrke
February 10, 2010 – After spending some time testing out Google’s latest innovation, Buzz, we’ve put together a short list of things you should know before diving in head-first. These compliment Geek Shui Living’s post from this morning, which is considered (by us anyway) a must-read, as well.
What exactly should you know about Buzz?
Unless patience is your middle name, wait for the desktop version to appear in your Gmail. Configuring it via mobile browser is possible, but painful. Some configuration options aren’t available via mobile web, at all.
If you have a Gmail account, you will have Buzz. We can’t find an option to opt out. It seems to be built into Gmail, itself. If you don’t want to use it, unfollow your Gmail contacts and make sure your account is configured as “Private”.
Contacts in your Gmail that are also Gmail accounts are automatically followed, without any additional configuration.
Setting your profile to be public will result in a publicly available and indexed URL with your Google username. Turning it off will still allow you to be searchable, by name, from within Buzz.
Via “Website Connections”, you can configure your Twitter posts to feed directly into Buzz. No password is required, but be forewarned that there can be a significant delay in the tweet actually appearing in Buzz.
Buzz posts are chronologically displayed, but it can be confusing initially because continued commenting on older posts, by those you follow, will push those posts continuously upward. Up to now, we cannot find a way to ignore the continued conversation.
When people follow you, there is no notification via email, like in Twitter. You just have to pay attention, when you go into Buzz, to the displayed new follower count.
There are obviously an infinite number of additional “ease of use” details that aren’t covered here. This list is just based on preliminary benchmarking against Twitter and Facebook. If you know of a way to address any of the issues we pointed out or have anything to add that others might find useful, please let us know via a comment or Geek Shui on Twitter. Good luck to all those who choose to embrace the Buzz!
