Google Reader: A different way to view your Buzz stream
As you may or may not know, Google Buzz is tightly integrated with another Google product besides GMail. That product is Google Reader and it may help you quiet some of the noise so you can “listen” to one person at a time.
Google reader allows you to subscribe to websites and blogs that have RSS feeds – most sites do. In fact, Google has just enhanced Reader to create a feed for sites that don’t have a feed. This allows you to be notified whenever there are changes to a site to which you’ve subscribed.
More on Google Reader can be found here.
So, the interface in Google Reader is a pretty basic but powerful two column display. On the left are your lists of subscriptions and on the right is the summary or complete post of the site you are navigating. There are shortcuts allowing you to scan quickly through lots of subscribed site updates in a very quick fashion.
With the advent of Google Buzz, another section appeared (at least I never noticed it before) on the left called “People you follow” with a parenthetical count of unread updates, from all the people you follow in Google Buzz.
So what you say? Well, what if you’re short on time and just want to scan some updates of a few folks? This feature in Reader allows you to do that without having to scan your whole Buzz stream.
Scanning your whole Buzz stream can take quite long and require several pages refreshes. Using the Reader feature lets you zero in on a few of your favorite folk’s updates.
Also, the drop-down menu next to the “People you follow” section enables one to sort Alphabetically and Recency along with other presentation options.
I found this section of Reader to be quite handy for my Google Buzz consumption. Let us know what you think?
