My Secret Love for Google Buzz

I’ll admit. I love me some Google Buzz. I know that a lot of people don’t, including the FTC. But for a social media novice like me, there are some benefits:

- I’m on Gmail/G-chat all the time, so I find it to be an extremely convenient content aggregator. The button is RIGHT there, underneath your inbox, and it’ll immediately tell you whether or not there’s been an update to check out.

- It allows you to connect your Twitter account. So if you’re sharing something on Twitter, but some of your friends aren’t active in that space, they can see that content (the same goes for Flickr). Whether or not my non-Twitter friends are ENJOYING seeing that content, I don’t know. Please don’t unfollow me?

- I had some issues with Google Reader. Many months ago, I was able to set one up, and subscribed to several blogs, but for some reason (let’s call it tech-retardation), I wasn’t able to connect with my friends on it. Google Buzz has taken care of that for me – I can post something directly if I’d like, or I’ll just tweet it/retweet it anyway.

That being said, Buzz has actually now made it much easier to connect with people who are just on Google Reader, so that may be something I revisit later.

- Because I could just never get into FriendFeed.

That being said, Buzz is definitely not perfect. Ongoing FTC-related issues aside, here’s what I don’t like so far:

- There’s a time lapse of at least a couple of hours between when you post on Twitter and when that tweet gets posted to Buzz. And that’s being generous – I don’t know if they’re fixing this problem or not, but last week, I was tweeting things in the late morning/early afternoon and they weren’t showing up on Buzz until 3AM the next day.

- I wish it’d let me be more selective about which tweets show up on Buzz. If the tweet is solely an @reply for someone, it doesn’t appear on Buzz, which is great, but sometimes I’ll go on a retweet spree, and I don’t necessarily want that all showing up. There’s a “delete” function for after it’s been posted, but with the time-lapse for importing tweets, timing on when you’ll know to go in and delete them is tricky.

I much prefer LinkedIn’s system for this – you can connect your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, but if you want, you can pick and choose which tweets to import by writing #in at the end of them.

- There doesn’t seem to be an option to import Facebook posts. That just seems kind of off to me.

But when all is said and done, I think I’m just a fan of anything that makes me feel like I’m connecting more with my friends and contacts.

Thoughts? Comments? If you haven’t checked Buzz out yet, Social Media Examiner has a good post about getting started.

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