Ask HN : Google buzz, your views ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN : Google buzz, your views ?

4 pointsashish016 comments

For me google buzz is a huge disappointment. The inability to block anyone from following you, who does not have a public profile is huge downer.

What do you think ?

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Few things I like: 1. It lives within Gmail. Generally its very difficult to attract people to whole new thing, while its very easy to make them do some differently which they are already doing. 2. Nice integration with Reader. 3. Nice location based features. (I think Twitter is currently working on this. They acquired some company for the this purpose).

I think it's noisy and useless. The UI isn't innovative or fun (or pretty), comments can't be threaded, the follower/friend model is too difficult for end users, it's not importing tweets at all, it's got massive delays for importing other media, it's pure clutter.

Moreover, most of us who want to use microblog platforms to communicate with friends already do, and we have established networks for those things. Google doesn't integrate those tools at all, neither by using FB Connect/Twitter OAuth to find Buzz-using friends nor by using those services' APIs to centralize posting, the way more successful clients have done.

Google reinvented the wheel, badly.

The delays and bugs importing tweets, I think, will sort themselves out as it matures.

One really powerful thing I see is that it could serve as a mechanism to join the various microblogging (and, really, blogging as well) platforms into a page that I'm already going to have a tab open for.

I like having it in my gmail, that's for sure.

The inability to block anyone from following you

You didn't go to the options drop-down next to each follower's name and choose "block"? I've heard that that works just fine. So far all of my followers are my friends whom I want following me.

To answer your question, I like Buzz so far. (I have never used Twitter, so I don't have Twitter as a point of comparison.) I think I will end up liking it better than Facebook, as most of my best friends are quite annoyed with Facebook's new home page and thus eager to try something else.

Well you can only block someone if they have a public profile. My x is in my "followers" list and does not have a public profile :-( . Why cant they have a facebook like option on whom to allow or not, why link something like this to a public profile.

I have to suspect they will increase privacy controls shortly. Remember, this has only been out for 24 hours.

Plus, I trust google more than facebook (I think). You hear what Zuck said? (This is paraphrased): "If we built facebook today I would probably make everything public by default. People need to get over their information being out in the public."

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