Google Buzz, only a week old, is gaining a lot of visibility, and is seen as Google’s most direct attack against social upstarts Facebook and Twitter. Some really like it. Others are up in arms about perceived privacy violations. Today, Chris Saad and I talked about whether Buzz’s clear mimicry of FriendFeed and other existing sites missed a new opportunity to innovate – and become a true social network aggregation tool, including aggregation of gestures.

Did Google make a mistake, and not really invent anything new with Buzz, making it immediately an also-ran? You'll find Chris and I don't always agree.

Original Post Here: ET Conversations

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The recent launch of Google Buzz has once again surfaced an undercurrent in the social Web - where a small number of active accounts can gain the lion's share of activity, either through their own interactions, or those of an active follower base. Whether earned through years of consistent activity on their blogs or parallel networks, or having volume thrust upon them through celebrity or suggested user lists and bundling, there are brand name individuals who command a greater share no matter where they go, and if you choose to follow them, your stream runs the chance of being overwhelmed.

Buzz, evolutionary but not revolutionary, has not yet made it simple to follow very active accounts, such as those from Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Pete Cashmore or me, as updates on our threads bounce to the in box by default - almost as a penalty for anybody who has chosen to engage, or who may have seen their ID added to a thread through the service's @Reply feature.


Busy accounts can be a nuisance on practically any network, whether that's Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, Buzz or any other. But in services where active feeds are resurfaced or pushed to the top, such as FriendFeed and Buzz, the impact is not actually from the originator of the content, but from their community. Comments on active feeds push the items back to the in box, or back to the top of the feed, and if you are following some of the more prominent accounts, you'll no doubt see the same names at the top.


That said, if this is getting in your way, and you are seething with rage at these social media power users, you're not using the tools well. Practically every network gives you tools to solve the problem.

1. On Twitter, you only have to see the updates from those you follow - with the exception of items retweeted by those you follow, from their connections, which you can opt out of on an individual basis. If an individual is too noisy, you can unfollow them at any time. Some innovative applications, including Brizzly, let you even "mute" a user for a short time so you can have them disappear during particularly busy times.

2. On Facebook, you can hide an individual's updates from your News Feed if they are too talkative. You can also hide all updates from specific applications (like Farmville or Mafia Wars) if you never want to see those updates. And yes, de-friending or blocking is available.

3. On FriendFeed, you can hide individual posts, block individual services (like Twitter or Disqus), block specific service updates by user, or, most successfully, you can put noisy people in their own lists, to sequester them from the rest of your feed. If worse comes to worse, again, you can always unfollow them, or block them outright.

4. With Buzz, you don't yet have the option to hide specific service updates or updates by user. But you can mute any thread just my using the "m" key, and as Buzz is integrated with GMail, you can use the same kind of filters available to any other e-mail. For example, I have set up a rule to move all Buzz entries into a mail box I call "social", taking them out of the in box.


If you want to quiet the impact of busy users, like Tom Foremski did by unfollowing Robert Scoble and me in Buzz, you can use GMail filters to your advantage - taking them to a dedicated folder and out of your in box.

For example, set up a filter where the Subject is "Buzz from Louis Gray", "Skip the Inbox (Archive It)" and "Apply the Label" of "Noisy", or whatever you like.. Then do the same for Robert and Pete and Chris Pirillo, Jason Calacanis, or anybody else who is swamping your Buzz experience.

Should we be blaming the noisy folks?

Like I mentioned last night, in sharing my social media data flow, I know there are people who have chosen to stop seeing my updates because of their frequency. But I don't plan to change my activity because of a new way it is interpreted and displayed by a new social network.

Part of the reason I am among the more active and visible people on Buzz is because over the last few years, I have promoted and cultivated the use of Google Reader and having active conversations there. I took the time to connect to and talk with more than 1,000 people in my shared items, and Buzz has taken advantage of that social network, moving it to a new place. Where others have not optimized for sharing, they are starting with less of a community.


But because of this, the community is also very comfortable talking on my feeds, as they are with other engaged folks. It is the ensuing conversations that bump them to the top, not the frequency that I share. I have been sharing 20-30 items a day in Google Reader every day for years, and it is filling Buzz the same way it has filled Reader and Facebook and FriendFeed.

If it's too much for you, use the tools that are there. Mute. Filter. Unfollow. Block. But there will always be discrepancies between the average users and those most active. Go ahead and make mine more active.

Two of the more annoying, yet almost inevitable, results of being active on multiple social media services are entry duplication, and repetitiveness for people who may follow you in multiple places. With the introduction of Google's Buzz platform earlier this week, I am seeing even more concerns as people face a challenge of where to put their activity, and how to move data from one service to another. It's something I give a lot of thought to, and continue to refine, to the best of my ability. As many have asked, I thought I would share my current strategy.

First, I wanted to highlight my discussion of this from back in May of 2009, when I said you should Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow. I even posted a SlideShare presentation on how to optimize this flow for all networks (see it here)

But as things change, networks come and go, with some disappearing (like Socialmedian) and others taking their place (Buzz).

As my comments stated in May, the ease of data creation and distribution can set up conflicts, as one tries to decide how to best send updates from one network to another. Often, people give up trying and resort to services like Ping.fm to send the same thing everywhere. With all deference to that service, now owned by Seesmic, it seems like a copout.

My goal, as it was then, is to create the content once, and have it land once, in the right places, as determined by the potential audience. As I see it, there are two categories of outlets, the content creation sites, and the content collectors. For me, my major content collectors are FriendFeed, Google Buzz, and to a lesser extent, Facebook, which I do not optimize well for, admittedly. For me, the content creation sites can be this blog, my Google Reader shares, Delicious bookmarks, Cinchast recordings, or photos from Smugmug and Flickr. Twitter works both as a creator of content and a distributor of content. Friendfeed also does an amazing job at redistributing content.


Content Creation

1. Blog Posts

Blog Posts from LouisGray.com are sent by e-mail, using FeedBlitz, to about 200 readers by e-mail. The posts are also sent, via RSS to a few thousand recipients. FeedBurner tells me there are 21,000 subscribers, but that includes FriendFeed, and is well known for overcounting. In addition, these posts go directly to Google Buzz. This is not an issue unless I share the item in Google Reader and introduce duplicates. When I do this, I almost always delete the duplicate on FriendFeed, for cleanliness sake.

2. Twitter Activity

My Twitter activity populates both Google Buzz and FriendFeed, as well as Twitter itself.

3. Google Reader Shared Items

Shares from Google Reader, almost 30 a day now, go to FriendFeed and Buzz, as well as a new Twitter account for this, called @lgstream. I wouldn't want to overpollute my main Twitter stream.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

I track all blog linkage on Delicious and flow those items through FriendFeed to Twitter. Lately, I have been editing the saved boomarks to include /by or /via language including the person's Twitter handle. (Example: here) These bookmarks also populate @lgstream on Twitter.

5. CinchCast Audio Recordings

Cinch podcasts let me post directly to Twitter and Facebook from the iPhone app, a major win for the product. Often, I choose just to send to Twitter. I also pull in the RSS feed of my CinchCasts to FriendFeed, and have the option, later, to embed recordings here on this blog.

6. Miscellaneous Status Updates

Updates posted natively to FriendFeed go to Facebook, and some go to Twitter, depending on my choice. Updates to Facebook status stay in Facebook. Updates directly on Buzz stay in Buzz, but also populate the @lgstream account.

7. YouTube Videos and Photos

All rich media I make goes to FriendFeed. YouTube and Flickr are registered with Buzz, but I have not used them yet. YouTube updates automatically populate my Twitter account.


Content Collectors

1. FriendFeed

FriendFeed's goal has always been to act as an aggregator of all my services. That's why FriendFeed gets more content than any other site. It also works best to repurpose as my stream into Facebook, and as a filter, to send some choice items to Twitter (as many as I would like). I am not sending FriendFeed to Google Buzz, and avoid duplicates this way.

2. Google Buzz

Buzz is largely a platform for my Google Reader shares and blog posts. It gets Twitter as well, but not immediately. As I worked for the last few years to cultivate a strong conversational community in my Google Reader shares, the conversations continue to flow and are very active.

3. Facebook

I am not optimizing much for Facebook today. It has never been a huge generator of conversation or traffic for me, though I could do a better job. I pull in my FriendFeed updates for my tech connections there, and know some friends or family have muted my noisy feed - always a risk when you mix different social circles.

Conclusion

Due to my fairly active stream and engagement in many places, it can seem busy. If people choose to follow more than one of my content collectors (for example, FriendFeed or Buzz), they can see duplication and get discouraged. But I cannot assume that they are the same audience, and I need to make the most content available in each place. What I do not want to do is share multiple instances of the same item, and annoy the crowd who has opted in to see me just once.

When you look at where your data is going, make sure you aren't sending everything to all places and annoying everyone who knows you aren't optimizing. Don't pipe one content collector into another. If you can make a second account that is for content only, as I have, go for it. And as always, if there is activity in your feed downstream, listen to the responses, and act on it.

You can find me on Google Buzz here, or on FriendFeed, Facebook or Twitter.

With more than 1 billion tweets sent out by the company's millions of users in each of the last two months, Twitter is seeing record usage after a year of meteoric growth. But finding those tweets can be hard, as the company's search engine at times has strained under the challenge of tracking the world in real time. To aid in building out the company's search capabilities, Twitter has just added Krishna Gade to the team.

Hailing from Microsoft, Krishna worked on the Redmond giant's Web search engine development team, he was a software development engineer, spending more than 5 years at Microsoft, where he helped build and ship many features of Bing, including index quality measurement, static rank computation infrastrucutre & algorithms, Web spam detection, query suggestions, entity extraction, autosuggest, contextual display ads and realtime/social search, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Previous to Microsoft, Krishna secured his masters in computer science at the University of Minnesota. His thesis was on "Algorithms for Pattern Mining in the Presence of Tough Block Constraints".

Krishna did not return cell phone calls prior to publishing to elaborate on his role at Twitter, but his hiring spells good news for the company's search engine getting even more hands on deck to become a more relevant and useful archive.