What People want in Google Buzz

I decided to start a conversation on Buzz about the features that people needed, here’s a few crowd sourced feature requests out of a conversation on which over 50 hard-core Buzz users were involved.

Threaded comments
Once a Buzz post becomes popular it’s impossible to keep the conversation in a linear fashion. The conversational nature of Buzz begs for threaded replies. Comments need to be collapsible

Buzz Stream Pause.
Real time updates are not cool when you can’t read a single one of them. When you follow over 500 people, it’s almost impossible to even read what they’re posting, you need to scroll down as the stream keeps coming in, a pause/play feature to stop messages from coming in would not also be handy for Buzz users but it’d also save Google a lot of HTTP requests that won’t really matter.

ReBuzz Button
Quickly repost a Buzz update on your own stream with a “ReBuzz” feature.

GMail-like Labels and Stars
Being able to add labels to people would be an elegant way to implement a similar feature to that of Twitter Lists. You could then decide to see updates from one or more labels, or search users you’ve labeled in the past.

Stars would be also an useful way to filter out buzz posts you might want to keep monitoring as they evolve.
(A star would basically be a “star” label, it’d just have a UI element of it’s own)

Content Source Filtering
Global (all the people you follow) and Specific (filter out one person’s content) source filters are needed to filter out updates that come from sites like Twitter.
For example, you may want to get twitter updates from everybody except a few people that post things that bother you on twitter… or maybe you just want to filter out Twitter completely.

Mute needs more options
Jon Sykes: “I’d like to be able to do something to a followee post that doesn’t make it vanish, but just stops it bubbling every time someone comments.”

You may or may not want to read Twitter updates from certain users or from all users.

Full featured Open API
Google says that they’ll soon add this one, but it’d be nice to have an open API for third party apps. To push content to my WordPress or Blogger site, or to even replace your WordPress commenting system for Buzz Threads.

Thanks to all the people who participated in making this list.

Related Links
Google Buzz Copied FriendFeed’s Worst Features
Six Things to Change In Buzz

Submit your ideas to this Google Moderator page called How to Fix Google Buzz