After using Google Buzz for a few days now I’m excited about the potential of this service to really bring together two important parts of my daily workflow, social media conversations and email. Ever since Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have become important parts of my daily life I’ve struggled with how to unify them. Friendfeed was the best bet, but a quick sale to Facebook killed that option, and didn’t address email. Now Google Buzz has taken the first big step to an overall unifying communication platform. And I’m excited.
There is a lot of, um, buzz, about buzz and it’s noted security flaws and it’s ability to drive you to ADD-delerium due to the way it integrates with Gmail. And the criticism is fair. And while these are early days for the product you can’t let some beta product ruin an important part of your private life and work – your email. So here are a few Google Buzz Tips that I’ve found work really well for me after a few days use.
To get the most of Google Buzz, try these tips:
1) Don’t follow weblebrities. Following someone like Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble or Pete Cashmore of Mashable is just asking to be innundated with Buzz updates from their fans that comment on everything they post. Each of their posts receives hundreds of comments and likes which does two things: 1) bumps their threads to the top of Buzz, so that every time you login you’re dealing with scrolling down through the same posts over and over; and 2) clogs your inbox if you’ve previously responded to the post (liking or commenting) which pops the threads into your Gmail inbox.
See an example below. 89 comments and 60 likes is a lot of activity to deal with in your email box. And you can get all of Mashable’s content on Twitter, where you don’t have to get the feedback of the masses.
2) Mute posts early and often. You can mute noisy posts, like the above, simply by clicking the drop down arrow next to comment. This allows you to mute the post and you will no longer hear updates from that particular post. This is particularly handy for when the argument devolves to back-and-forth banter between a few people on a post like the above. You’ve extracted the value you wanted, now mute it and move on.
Here’s how to mute on Google Buzz:
3) Move Buzz updates into a new label and auto archive them out of your inbox. If you don’t want to see when new comments get added to your Buzz items simply create a new filter in Gmail that takes your Buzz update items and moves them to a label/folder out of your inbox that you can read at your convenience. This article about moving Buzz updates out of your inbox from Lifehacker has all the details if you don’t know how to create filters in Gmail.
Those are my top 3 tips for making Google Buzz work for me – what are yours? Share any hacks and tricks in the comments! Thanks!