Reader allows you to select someone and see their Shares. This allows you to focus on people you like seeing shares from more than people you don’t care about as much (like if you’re in a time crunch)

This Buzz River of information approach doesn’t make it easy to select who you want to read. To me it looks like a priority is being placed on WHEN over WHO

Will Buzz ever be like Reader where we can see if the people we care about the most have updated without having to go through an entire wall to notice?

Or maybe I’m just not sure how to filter Buzz yet.

Thoughts?

I’m a huge Google Reader fan. I have 50 people that I follow and we are all connected to each other and very active on the sharing and commenting section of that site.

A big dowside to Buzz is that while comments posted on shares in Reader show up in Buzz (and vice versa), Buzz isn’t set up to mark items “as Read” like they get marked as “Read” in Reader after you read them. This is because like Facebook’s newsfeed, they don’t want posts to go away or out of view like a “read” item does in Reader. They want it to be this constantly flowing river of information arranged by the date of when it is posted. Nothing ever goes away. It becomes part of this long running permanent record.

My Reader friends and I are intrigued by Buzz, but don’t really know what to do with it. So far for us it’s meant a lot of seeing the same Shares twice.

And I’m not an expert in Twitter, but it’s not like you can yet connect your Twitter account in such a way that all the people you follow on Twitter will have their tweets start rolling into your Buzz. Right? I mean, I can choose to share my Tweets in Buzz and anyone that has linked up both their Twitter and their Buzz will appear in my Buzz when they tweet, but won’t that leave out a big group of people (like the celebrities that are fun to follow)

Gina, big fan, and I would love to hear you talk about this on TWiG. Thanks,
Michael

Now, I’ll be even more impressed if they have native Twitter (2-way) and Facebook integration in the pipe so you can publish content as well.

I’m still trying to iron out practical applications for it, but it could be a great way to keep me in Gmail where I live most of the time anyway, and out of 6 other tabs worth of feeds.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Buzz_Reveals_Google_s_Split_Personality

I’ve noticed this problem before with other Google services like Picasa.

Basically Google pretends they don’t know who you are and forces you to open a regular gmail account?

Google has failed with products in the past and I believe this may be another one of their product failures in the making.

If anyone is interested I outline why I think Google Buzz will fail here: What’s All The Buzz About?

I have used it on an @gmail.com account and it seems to be pretty cool; however all of my email, contacts and my Android 1.6 phone are linked to my apps account.

I have managed to post a couple of Buzz updates from maps on the phone but without the Buzz folder in Gmail there is no way to fill in the profile details or link other account feeds (e.g. Twitter).

Also, the geo-location could do with a “city level” tuning knob like in Latitude, Brightkite, etc. If I am sending a public buzz I don’t really want to be giving out the GPS coordinates of my house.