I’m still trying to figure out the best way to use Google Buzz. But, already, I’ve had to ‘unfollow’ people such as Robert Scoble and Louis Gray because they are way too ‘noisy’ they crowd out everyone else in my stream.
I have had others unfollow me too because my Twitter stream was feeding directly into Google Buzz and taking up most of their stream.
Louis Gray often says that information overload is a failure of your filters. That’s true. I just don’t know how to set the filters on Google Buzz beyond ‘unfollow’ and I expect others don’t know too.
It would be great if there was a dial, where you could ‘dial down’ some people, and raise up others. That’s a simple interface control that everyone knows how to use.
Twitter, and to some extent Facebook, are good tools to promote blog posts, videos, micro-posts, etc, because there is less danger of dominating a followers’ stream. That’s because unlike Google Buzz, those streams are organized in ways to tend to limit such potential for annoyance.
I’m sure that Google Buzz will evolve to be more like those streams.
In the meantime, I would love if Google Buzz didn’t keep telling me the number of new ‘buzzes’ in my stream. I’m less likely to check them when there is a large number of them. As it is, I don’t like going to Gmail much anyway, because of my 67,265 unread emails.
Gmail feels like "Guilt mail" because I haven’t replied to so many messages. GBuzz is far less guilt ridden, but it does feel like a lot of extra work, a lot more extra interactions that need to be done, when I’d rather be interacting offline.
