My latest FastCompany.com video segment, shot several weeks ago, is about managing your social media updates, partly by funneling them all into one place (like your email inbox).
Then Google Buzz launched.
So, here’s my social media productivity two-punch: first the video, then a walk through Google Buzz’s more advanced features.
Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life is two minutes and nine seconds on how to keep up with social networking updates without spending your whole day managing it all.
After thinking about Google Buzz in the context of funneling updates into a single place, it seems clear that Buzz doesn’t just take on Twitter and Facebook, it takes on any kind of “universal inbox” product, like my beloved TweetDeck. It makes Gmail your universal inbox by putting social media updates right under your email inbox. A LOT of people have said that Buzz’s inbox integration is immediately overwhelming and too noisy, and I have to agree. I’ve already created a filter to make Buzz items skip the inbox immediately. Find out how to do that–and turn off Buzz completely–in today’s piece, How to Do Everything in Google Buzz (Including Turn It Off) .
5 Comments
Jared Forsyth
Hey Gina, you should post a “Google Buzz Wish list” call for comments. I know I’ve got a long one already 😉 among the most urgent:
1) Collapsed Buzz view (auto-hide comments)
2) hide all from a specific service (e.g. I don’t want to see all of Scoble’s tweets, but I do want to see the rest of his posts)
Gabriel
@Jared Forsyth I agree 100%. Scrolling down a popular Buzz is frustrating.
Gina, thank you so much. You are providing a much needed service here and your just so darn good at it 🙂
Siira
Is it magic, that was exactly what I was asking for the past days and here you go, create a nice movie that shows it all 🙂 Keep up the good work!
Mark Brown
How about using http://www.threadsy.com?
This site enables you to collect email from Gmail, hotmail, twitter and facebook all from one site.
Cheers
Mark 🙂
Lee Bartelme
The wish list is a good idea, but I’m pretty happy with buzz so far. No apps needed for my iPhone, just the site.
I think Google is really making waves, no pun intended, with Buzz. I love that it’s in my inbox and I don’t have to go to a different site to access the buzz. It’s just a click away in my inbox. It flows nicely with other social media networks, and I think it’s clever they pretty much added all their gmail users to the buzz network. No need to sign up you already are.
I am concerned though, as they roll out more products, what other things I might opt into without really knowing.