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Off the track: my views on Google Buzz

Amongst the plethora of features that Gmail has, Buzz is the latest add-on.
It has given gmail users a platform to share their views, links or any kind of information with the world. They can link their Picasa, Twitter and blogspot account with Buzz and speak their mind and heart over the web. All your updates in any of these sites that you link with your Buzz account, will automatically get reflected in Buzz. You needn’t post the same information on each site separately. Means, no more shuffling between various tabs—twitter, picasa, gmail—you get all in one window. Plus, you join Buzz and you instantly get access to 170 million plus gmail subscribers. Sounds cool!
But this consolidation is not fool proof. Updates on the linked sites don’t get reflected instantly. There is no sorting order in which updates are shown on Buzz page. The one with the max comments or views gets displayed while the rest are hid in the background. There are other tiny-miny flaws as well which make us doubt Buzz’s future.
For these flaws it also faced the ire of the critics since its launch.
Some people have written it off as just another add-on from Google’s stable, some are touting as a competitor to the sites like Twitter and Facebook. But is it really going to give a tough fight to these successful social networking (also advertising platform) sites or will it fizz out like the not-so-successful, allow me to call it disastrous, Google wave?
I feel it is damn early to write off Buzz. Yes, there are problems, there are things that Google needs to work on--but we can’t deny that Google has done a fairly good job of consolidating an email client with the social networking medium.
Buzz is here to stay, atleast for some while. And if Google does away with the tiny miny flaws that we have observed, we are sure there will be no looking back.

Using Buzz? Some handy tips

1. To get started with Buzz, go to the Settings>Buzz and turn it on. Once done, then you can define the sites you want link with Buzz.
2. To turn it off go to the Buzz pane again and select the Disable buzz option. To leave no traces of any of your posts on Buzz on the web, edit your Google profile. For that go to the www.google.com/profiles.
3. Reduce the clutter that each Buzz post creates in your inbox by creating a filter. Go to Settings>Filter and create a new filter for label: buzz and that is it. All your Buzz mails will automatically get saved under archives.

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