Likes and comments count in Google Buzz

Among the things people miss in the shiny new social network / aggregator from Google is some information about the number of comments and likes. FriendFeed puts that right on your profile for all visitors to see, while on Facebook nothing like this exists and on top of that, I have never heard anybody complain about it.

Google Buzz treats that information more privately, because it can’t be found on your public Google profile, but in the mostly ignored Google Dashboard, accessible only to the user. Like the starred items count for Google Reader, the “Buzz” section of the Dashboard offers some nice statistics about your Buzz activity that you won’t find anywhere else.

There you can find out how many public and private posts you made or imported in Buzz, the number of comments and liked items, as well as links to the most recent post, comment and like. If the numbers are accurate, commenting was a more popular activity in these early days, at least for me. Hopefully this information will be made more visible and users will be given the choice to display it on their Profile if they wish.

Update: After publishing the article, I noticed other people have similar "habits" regarding likes vs. comments on Buzz, including Google Software Engineer DeWitt Clinton and Swedish Internet Evangelist Stefan Svartling. On FriendFeed, the number of likes is generally higher than comments. Commenting on Stefan's buzz, I suggested this could happed because liking was more "powerful" on FriendFeed: the liked items appeared to your followers like any post and you received notifications about future activity. In Buzz, you can only follow the conversation if you make a comment, and this way people are more inclined to comment on entries rather than just like them. Please share your opinions and Buzz statistics in the comments, I would love to see how this trend evolves!