9M posts and comments in 2 days with 200 posts per min: Google Buzz

It has been just two days, Google Buzz released. Google said that 9 million people already posted and commented using Buzz, whereas tens of million of people are checking out it. Alongside this, they reported that the mobile users around the world posting in rapid growth. And the rate of post from mobile users is 200 posts per minute! Despite lots of criticism and flaws from the users, people are loving that. And another good news is that Google will listen to the user feedback. Upon the feedback, they will improve Buzz.

According to Google, its Buzz service already has over 9 million posts and comments, meaning that it’s getting over 160,000 comments and posts per hour. That’s a staggering, staggering number. Mobile usage is also gaining in popularity — over 200 posts per minute by mobile phone according to the search giant.

Despite those numbers, there have been a number of complaints about Google Buzz in terms of usability and privacy. In rather rapid fashion, Google has responded to those criticism in a blog post highlighting several new changes it has made.

Google says that they will create a more obvious way to hide your follower count. This has been an issue as it potentially exposes who you email and/or chat with the most. Also new is the immediate ability to block anyone who starts following you. Finally, Google will make it easier to see what people will show up on your “following you” public page. This was (and still is) tricky because only users with public profiles show up there, but it wasn’t obvious who that was.

It’s good to see Google reacting so quickly to some of the feedback they’re getting. That said, there remains a lot of work to be done with Buzz. The main problem I have with it is that it’s entirely too noisy and there is no good way to turn that down without unfollowing people. Basically, you have to take the “social” out of the social network for it to be most useful. It seems that there are simply some UI/UX tweaks they could do to correct this.

Specifically, there are three new changes to Google Buzz. Here is the new changes that has been posted in the official Google blog:

1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile
If you don’t want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can always opt out during the profile set-up when you first use Buzz or at any time from the edit profile page. We are making this option more prominent in the set up process, to ensure everyone who wanted to hide these lists can do so easily.

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2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you
We are making it easier to block anyone, by adding “Block” links to the list of people following you. Previously, you were only able to block people from following you after they had created a public profile. Now, you can block anyone, regardless of whether or not they’ve already created profiles for themselves.

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3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile
Initially, we showed you a list of all the people who would be following you once they created a public profile. However, only those contacts who had already created a public profile would show up on your public follower list. We’re making this clearer by explicitly distinguishing which of your followers have public profiles and will show in your public list of followers. With this change you’ll be able to see who is on the public list of followers that everyone else sees.

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We designed Buzz to make it easy to connect with others and have conversations about things that interest you, and it’s great to see millions of you doing this already. It’s still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind. For more information about the choices you have when using Google Buzz, please visit our Help Center.

Sources: Gmail Official Blog, Mashable, TechCrunch

Aguntuk

Piash Das is Senior Editor for TheTechJournal. He is also one of the founding members of TheTechJournal. He loves to write about latest technology. He is interested in Renewable Energy & Linux. He is working as a Telecom Optimizer in RF Field and loves Football very much. You can reach him on Twitter And Google+.

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