Google Buzz: The Superior Sharing Network

Content is everything across social media and unless you're a very influential person, it's going to take more than a string of plain text to inspire folks to look at what you have to say.

Sharing well-crafted, media-rich posts in the places where people gather is an effective way to find others who share your interests -- just don't expect them to click to uncover your message. Complete posts which can be viewed in a stream offer the best chance for your shared items to be discovered. Today, most folks are convening on Twitter, Facebook and now Google Buzz.

This writing will examine the content sharing capabilities of The Big Three social networks — I've also included FriendFeed because it offers an excellent example of properly executed sharing features and very nice content presentation.  I will not delve into any other issues regarding these networks.  The way shared content looks, what information can be conveyed and ease of posting said content is the focus.

Each of the below examples shows my best effort to share the same content on each of the four subject networks.  The content consists of four photos, descriptions and some commentary.

Twitter

Click to link to tweet.

Twitter offers 140 characters of text to express your thoughts or share a link -- wonderfully simple. Many folks also use Twitter for conversation, but I've mostly used it as a place to share links of things in which I'm interested.

The difficulty with Twitter is getting your 140 characters to stand out.

Tweets can't display images so I've linked my images back to FriendFeed where the pictures and some commentary await. Of course, you can't format Twitter text.

This is obviously the poorest medium for sharing compelling, media-rich content.

Facebook

Click to link to post.

Conventional shared posts to Facebook show just one very small thumbnail.  I needed to create a photo album to share all four photos and only three photos appear below the post.  This was not a quick nor simple task. Also, folks will need to be motivated to click to see more pictures.

I was able to add a brief description in the header text field, but no more than 420 characters will fit and any more than 320 will invoke a See More link — another click. Further descriptive text can be added in the comment fields or as a caption under each photo — I added captions.

There's no way to format text in Facebook headers or comments.

The Facebook sharing bookmarklet doesn't offer the ability to insert a text excerpt and only allows one tiny thumbnail, when it works.  You can copy and paste text into the content box that appears after Facebook has processed the shared link.

Facebook posts are ugly.

FriendFeed

Click to link to post.

I think the FriendFeed post looks the best, so far.  There's enough character space on top to write a decent headline and some descriptive text, but not enough for a micro-blog. There's no text formatting and no line breaks in FriendFeed. If needed, further descriptive text can be added in the comment fields, but if you've got a lot to say you can either break up your writing into many comment fields or create a big lump of words.

Please note that in the original post FriendFeed only displayed two photos, and a click is required to see all four.

FriendFeed offers the best bookmarklet for sharing web content, among the networks presented here.  Grabbing a text excerpt (which is then inserted into a comment field) and pictures is easy and it works.

Google Buzz

Click to link to this Buzz.

Google Buzz gets sharing right with almost 800 visible characters before the text collapses into a summary block and the ability to do simple text formatting -- bold, italic and strike-through. And paragraphs.  When sharing a web article the visible text space is ideal for a title, commentary and a text excerpt from the shared article. This is Buzz blogging.

All four pictures display and I've tested Buzz up to ten photos, which all display without the need for an extra click.

When you upload photos to Buzz they are stored in your Picasa account and enlarge when clicked in your post.  I've heard some folks complain about uploaded photos going into Picasa, but I think it's a feature -- I'm glad all my posted photos will be archived.  You can also select photos from your Picasa albums to post.

To add shared content to Buzz you may post content directly from Google Reader, use the Share in Reader bookmarklet, paste a link into the Buzz post field or just input text.  For media-rich posts, I prefer to paste a link into Buzz as it offers the ability to choose pictures and excerpt text more elegantly than the bookmarklet.  It also provides the opportunity to add some text formatting and commentary, the latter being critical to set your post apart from ordinary shares and encourage folks to engage and converse with you.

If you share a lot, want to add value to your shares and want folks to completely and almost effortlessly see what you have to share, I believe Buzz is the best choice.

Of course, the highest impact shares are meaningless if there's no one to look at them and no one to interact with you, so I'll defer to Thomas Hawk regarding why Buzz will be a hit.

If you liked this writing or if you disagree, join me on Buzz and let's talk about it.

Tagging Rancho Santa Fe With Geo-Graffiti

Sam’s initial conceptual drawing.

Last night on Google Buzz my friend and neighbor Sam Afifi suggested that we tag our town with graffiti — high-tech virtual graffiti.  His idea was to use Buzz tags to create a peace symbol around the central village of Rancho Santa Fe, California.  I thought the idea was subtly subversive and agreed.  Below is Sam’s initial drawing of where we would align our Buzz tags.

Luckily, Linea Del Cielo and La Gracia converge at the entrance to the RSF Village creating an ideal base for the peace sign.  The spine of the peace sign begins at the steps of The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe and runs northwest up Paseo Delicias, the main street of RSF.

I did my Buzz tagging with an iPhone and Sam used an HTC phone running the Android OS.  Android was much better suited for this task as Sam was able to overlay the peace symbol on his live Google map, which provided an accurate guide for proper Buzz tag placement. I was left with something closer to dead reckoning using only Sam’s location and a vague familiarity with the peace sign layout.  The HTC battery outperformed the iPhone battery by about two to one, which was not a surprise to me.

Buzz tags were dropped at the place from which we sent a Buzz — tags visible to anyone viewing a Buzz layered Google map of RSF.  After about three hours of tireless Buzzing, we had littered the RSF Village with over two hundred such tags.

We returned to my home to gather and consolidate our data and were distraught to discover that many of our tags had apparently disappeared.  We quickly learned that the Google Buzz map only shows around forty-five tags on the screen at a time.  So Sam and I went through all of the tags and whittled them down to the best thirty-two.  Most of my tags were discarded — many wildly errant.

Sam chose the best tags and the results are shown below at two different zoom levels.

If you’re on a location enabled device and logged into Google Buzz, you can view the Rancho Santa Fe peace sign live by clicking here.

We’re not sure how long these tags will persist, but we had fun making a personal, virtual statement on the community in which we live.