I like Google Buzz, but...

I want the option of looking at Buzz with a List view or Expanded view (or user specific view - talked about below). Just like Google reader. Give me the the first 140 characters like twitter, and then let me pop it open if I want to read more, or see all the comments. No pictures or videos at first glance please. 

Mute needs to work like it does in Wave.  If I mute a conversation I don't want to see it again unless I go looking for it. Seems like currently the idea is I wont get notified of the anything in Gmail if I mute it. But I don't consider Gmail my Buzz inbox. The main stream is my buzz inbox. If I mute it, I mean mute it from my stream. If you want to keep it that way (where mute is affecting your Gmail inbox instead of my Buzz inbox/stream) then you need to allow me to delete a post. And once it is deleted, it does not show up in my Buzz stream again. If I want to see it again, I would have to go to that user's individual stream and view it there, or undelete it there to allow it back into my main stream. 

I need lists or something. Actually, in true Google fashion give me labels/tags. There are too many people I don't really want in my everyday stream. Some people are just too noisy. I get it - you like Star Wars and Legos - I don't want to see every picture you found of that shit on the web today. But I still want a list of all you freaks to check in on from time to time.

Give me stars to tag favorites with and I want a quick click button toolbar on each Buzz post. I don't want to click down arrows and select stuff. And stuff. Let me click and keep moving.

These are all things that are already part of other Google products. Seems easy to bring them over here. (seems easy because it's not what I do).

But here is where it would be nice to see Google put in a little extra effort. I want better user/follow settings.

I would like the ability to tag a user as a certain type and that would dictate how their buzz showed up. Maybe a ranking (or super star) system. If I rank someone a 1 - then no matter what they post I see the whole post and a large chunk of comments below. If I tag them a 2, I get the 140 characters of the post with icons letting me know there are pics/videos, how many likes and comments attached to the post, etc. If I tag them a 3, I see their name collapsed behind other Buzz posts, just letting me know that they had something there but with no other info on it in my way. I can click to see more. But no matter what - I only see them in my stream when they post. People commenting on their post does not elevate it to the top of my stream again. 

To make this work, I need a small tool/link bar that runs across the top of each user/post so I can make changes to their classifications on the fly. On the left side of this bar there is a 1, 2, 3. I click on that to move that user around in the ranking system. I can only have one of these selected at a time. Obviously we can do better than numbers, but you get the drift. On the right of the tool bar is a star, a mute and an X. The star makes it a favorite, the mute makes sure I don't get notified about it in Gmail and the X makes it go away forever (unless I go undelete it on the users page). 

And dear god, don't give me a "follower settings" page. If you make me do that, or go to a list view of the people I follow and decide how much I care about them - it's worthless. I need to be able to mark/tag them on the fly. Everyone starts as a 3 when I follow them. As I see their posts more (and how much they post lolcats and avatar shit) I can just reclassify them as I move through my stream. And as soon as I move someone from a 3 to a 1, all the post in my stream should reformat to the new setting (oK - that seems kind of hard - so I'll just refresh after making a change if I care that much).

On a side note - I really like getting a Buzz update in Gmail and it works like I was on the Buzz tab. I want that with Wave too. I want a Wave to come to Gmail and act like a Wave when I have it open. 

Then after Buzz does all that, I would like it to make me a burrito.

A lot going on - but not a lot of time to talk about it.

I have not been terribly active as far as blogging about technology, software and social media lately. I have a lot of things I want to talk about as far as Google Wave goes, and I'm currently in the middle of a roll out of cloud based Point of Sale software for 70+ retail location, which should be providing tons of information as well. Not to mention we just rolled out our new site (www.strasburgchildren.com) and are getting ready to start the social media phase of our re-branding online (which by the way, I'm looking for a e-commerce/social media coordinator if anyone knows of someone). Oh yeah - and I'm moving our entire organization over to Google Apps in a couple of weeks. Even with all that going on, or because of all that going on, I've been too tired to get anything out there lately. 

So follow over at wallacewilson.net instead, it grabs what I'm doing off the web, which is not a lot right now - but still more than what's going on here.

I'll be back over here eventually.

Seesmic's Web App - Love it

I've been using Seesmic's new web app for twitter for the last few days and I have to say I love it. I was begging for this a few months ago and this is pretty close to what I wanted. I don't plan on using anything else to access twitter (on my computer) - unless a better web app comes out. Either way - I'm not going back to a desktop app.

If you are someone who just uses twitter.com to access twitter - it's a no brainer to switch to this. For those of you that use a desktop app like Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop - you really need to give this a try, but you will find a few things missing. The one I really want is multiple accounts. The other two that I don't need so much, but I like, are groups and facebook integration. I assume that @loic and team will figure out a way to get them in soon enough. Until then, running the page in two different browsers (when I need two accounts) will cover my bases.

Here is a good post by Louis Gray on Seesmic Web. He quotes Loic as saying, "there has needed to be some evangelizing for this new introduction to be accepted". I don't understand why this is such a hard thing for people to accept. Especially for something like Twitter where if you don't have a web connection - there is not a lot you can do anyway.

I'm always excited to uninstall another program from my computer. Personally I want all my apps in the cloud. And I don't need any syncing (except maybe with my iPhone I guess, where the AT&T pipe is still slow). Just keep it all in the cloud and give me a browser.

Friendfeed is doing "Real-Time" right

Friendfeed has put out it's version of real-time search, and it's better than what anyone else is doing. Much better than Twitter. The best part is you can embed this real time search anywhere on the web. This is what I wanted Twitter to do not long ago - so at the end of a blog post I could include the most recent conversation on the web about the topic.

Friendfeed does not have as many users as Twitter and the early adopter crowd leans more to the tech side than the whole of Twitter would. But for this blog it works.

And that's not to say no one talks about pop culture or politics or whatever at friendfeeed. They ramble on about that stuff over there as well. For this post, I wanted to grab something that was getting a lot of talk on the web - so you could see the feed in action (it auto updates). Michael Jackson is moving too fast to even monitor. So I went with SarahPalin. You can roll your mouse over a post to pause the feed from moving while you read.



If I ever get back to writing over here - I'll start using this.

When did Facebook get Google "Connect" ... and why doesn't it work?

I just noticed this for the first time today. In my facebook settings - I can tell it to automatically log me into facebook if I am logged into some other network. I chose Google, since the first thing I do every morning is log into Gmail. Here is a screen shot:

 

This would be awesome if it actually worked. I could not get it to work in Chrome, Firefox or IE. Is this new or has it been around a while? Anyone know the dealio with this?
 

My Initial (Premature) Thoughts on Google Wave.

Wow - from the little bit I see here (and it is a very little bit) - Google Wave looks and sounds impressive. I hope this actually comes out soon and is not just vaporware.

And while it looks to be a massive piece of software, I hope it is not another fragment of Google floating around the web. I hope it acts as a replacement for Gmail. I don't want it to be a separate thing I have to log into. Or something that I can't use with people not on Wave. Hopefully a "wave" acts as an email (or IM , or SMS, or meeting request or whatever) for those that are not on wave. Obviously there will be new functions that can only be a wave, but I hope it is backwards compatible with other communication. Don't make this just be a different network.

Since this is all about communication - hopefully we will see it bring in Google Voice as well. That's important. And hopefully the calendar plays a major role in here. I would think the events and meetings I'm involved in would be considered a wave since more often than not it involves my contacts. Picasa will obviously be involved.

Will I be able to add other social data to my contacts? Can I tie my friend's flickr, twitter and last.fm account to them. Can I generate a news feed on my contacts from this data? Jaiku started playing with this idea - does Google bring it and it's more prominent status update over here? (IM status update does not count - that needs to be different).

If it somehow includes this giant wish list maybe Google finally pulls off the long awaited "the internet is the social network". I've always doubted that was possible - but this looks close. Well the direction my imagination went when I saw the picture looks close. I'm excited to see what Google's imagination comes up with.

Google breaks the intranet - with no warning

Here is an issue with moving to "the cloud", and even more so moving to the cloud with Google. I recently moved our company's intranet over to Google Sites. I wanted a low cost, easy way for department heads to be able to manage and update their sections of our intranet from anywhere. Google Sites was perfect for this. Recently though Google made some unannounced changes to Sites that broke the intranet.

Google apparently decided to host images and code for the new Sites on different domains than they had previously been on. The problem with that is we use internet blocking software at our retail locations and all domains (even location of graphics) have to be opened up in the software.

Since we had no warning or control over the switch - everyone just came in one morning and could no longer see or navigate the page (we also lost all our navigation links on the site for some reason and had to set them all back up).

So since this is in the cloud (and mostly because it is Google) we received no warning or notification that changes were coming - they just came. We were given no control over the change. I did not even receive an email about it when it was complete. I had to start digging once the phone calls started pouring in. Had this been on our own servers, we would have had the option to upgrade at the best possible time for us (which would not have been the moment we walked in the door on May 19th).

Had it not been a secret (for whatever reason) we would have prepared the PCs ahead of time to access the new domains Google was going to use to host these. But this is what happens when you let these things out of your control.

We use the free version of Google Apps for this intranet. But even so - with Google making such a push to get business to take their cloud services seriously- it's a pretty stupid way to go. You're not going to talk us into upgrading to additional features if you keep jacking around with us.