Open Google Reader shared items in Buzz

Google Reader didn’t get a particularly good start for the year, between the search being broken for a couple of days and the (accidental) removal from the Google navigation bar, which fueled speculation that the product could be abandoned or sidelined in favor of other projects. Despite the largely unjustified concerns, new features are being added all the time. Just today I noticed the shared items have a new ‘Options’ menu in the lower half next to the comments section.

Right now, there is a single option available: ‘View this shared item in Google Buzz’. It’s a good step to integrate the two services better. Personally I only skim the top items in Buzz, since I prefer to read the full story in Reader, but some extra features of Buzz are missing; you can’t follow the conversation easily without leaving a comment, you can’t edit your own comment or get the URL of someone else’s. It’s not a perfect solution, but this new option addresses some of these annoyances. It would be nice to see the menu expand with some of the most requested features for Google Reader, like loading the full article from partial feeds or the comments from the original post.

Connect Quora to Google Buzz

If you’ve got caught up in Quora’s perfect storm, the site itself might not be enough. You probably want to spread the word about it on other social networks, to bring more people in. Quora lets you easily share answers on Twitter and Facebook, but unfortunately Google Buzz users are left out. Which naturally led to a question on Quora: Is there a way to link Quora and Google Buzz?

One answer, as already added, is to subscribe to the (not dead yet!) RSS feed from the Quora profile through Google Reader and then share individual posts to send them to Buzz. Not exactly ideal, since it requires a lot of manual intervention and it looses the ‘real-time’ coolness everybody seems to want these days.

Track visits from Buzz with Google Analytics

In spite of numerous critics, Google Buzz continues to evolve and add features at a fast pace. Just yesterday the team released a set of official ‘Share on Buzz’ buttons that can be easily added to blogs and websites. Almost immediately people started to adapt it for Blogger's home page or as a bookmarklet to share any site. Personally, I prefer to share pages in Google Reader that has similar tools, because you can collect the entire page and search it’s contents later, if it offers a full RSS feed.

I have also included a compact button on my blog and, after reading Rick Klau’s article, got an idea how to make the button even better: add Google Analytics page tags to track clicks originating from Google Buzz. It’s just a matter of changing the original code to add some parameters to the regular blog post URL. The text you should insert in the Blogger template looks like this:

<a class='google-buzz-button' data-button-style='small-count' expr:data-url='data:post.url + &quot;?utm_source=Buzz&amp;utm_medium=BlogButton&quot;' href='http://www.google.com/buzz/post' title='Post on Google Buzz'/>     
<script src='http://www.google.com/buzz/api/button.js' type='text/javascript'/>

Follow a Buzz conversation without commenting

Since the launch about two months ago, Google Buzz has made a series of changes and tweaks, from privacy settings to the rules that determine which posts are promoted to the top of your stream to comment collapsing. More improvements are on the way, and hopefully filtering will arrive sooner rather than later. One other thing people complained about is the noise from all the conversations piling up in the inbox and overflowing the other messages. While it’s easy to set up a filter to archive emails originating from Buzz, the team also implemented controls to let people choose which Buzz is important enough to land in the inbox.

Between all these rapid updates, some newly introduces features didn’t get as much press as the others. One thing that bothered me from the start about Buzz is that you couldn’t follow a conversation without actually commenting on it. And liking had no effect either. But Buzz recently gained that ability, that can be found in the context menu next to the date: it’s called “Deliver to my Inbox”.

Remove buzz from your Gmail Sent folder

One of the annoyances Google Buzz introduced to our Gmail inbox are the dozens of unnecessary messages flooding the ‘Sent’ folder. Practically every Buzz we send out gets copied there, not only manual messages typed into the Buzz status box, but also from all the connected services. Going there to search for a recently sent email, you can find yourself looking at a long list of your tweets instead.

Of course, you can use search to filter out buzz with an expression like this: in:sent –is:buzz, but typing that over and over is time-consuming. Even if you use Quick Links to save the search, it’s annoying to change your habits, not to mention Gmail search won't let you change the number of results to something more useful than 20. And because ‘Sent’ is a system label, like ‘Buzz’, you cannot remove it from a message like you can with regular labels.

Or at least, you can’t in the web interface, but accessing Gmail through IMAP opens up that possibility. In an IMAP client, all Gmail labels are converted into folders and you can easily move messages around, even out of the Sent folder. The best part is the changes are synced back to the server, so the messages will be removed from web-based Gmail as well.

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.

Google Buzz: privacy, present and future

When I first heard the rumors about a new social service being integrated into Gmail, one of my first reactions was: “expect privacy problems”. Unfortunately for Google’s new service, I was right. Practically not a day got by without another article detailing some new way Buzz exposes your Gmail address, your other addresses shared with close friends or even your physical address through the mobile app. There were also some very heated reactions from the public; one of them has restricted access to the blog in the mean time and you can find pieces of it on other blogs covering the uproar.

Personally, I think this public reaction was completely blown out of proportions. Of course, the massive online coverage only served to amplify the “news”, but after all, what can you expect from journalists, if their main concern is traffic? I mean, nobody gets that worked up about security holes in Microsoft products these days and users aren't massively dumping Windows or Internet Explorer when a new flaw is discovered. I don’t deny Buzz had or still has privacy issues, every online service does, but Google was very quick to offer solutions to the “public” concern. I think the timely reaction proves the company takes the privacy of the users very seriously and that it intends to support the new service in every way that it can.