I’m slowly rediscovering Google Buzz. I know, I know: it’s not Twitter. And yes, yet it looks so damn similar to it. Google Buzz is one of those things Google launches and then forgets about, but it turns out that there are many interesting users to follow on Buzz who daily share a plethora of cool links, Scobleizer being one of them. So I decided to give it a try and go look for some applications to use with it.
I stumbled upon Buzzie from Alberto Garcìa Hierro and I have to say it’s pretty good app for Google Buzz.
Buzzie comes as a universal app in the App Store, and at first launch I thought the developers just opted for scaling the iPhone version to a bigger screen. The app actually looks like a bigger iPhone version, and a lot of work has to be done to build a great iPad experience. But anyway, it doesn’t look that bad. I’ve seen far worse implementations on the App Store, so let’s move on.
Once you’ve logged in with your Google Account you get this sort of dashboard which allows you to jump to the actual posts from the people you follow, nearby posts, followers, your posts and settings. Nobody in my town seems to be using Buzz, so bare with me if I haven’t managed to test the Nearby feature. As for the Settings, you can’t really do much there. You can set up your favorite URL shortening provider (I use bit.ly), choose to enable automatic correction and capitalization, set image quality and notifications. Not that much to customize indeed, and I like it.
About the Find People feature: don’t use it. You’ll only find spammers and creepy dudes tweeting about “free cellphones”, so do yourself a favor and never tap on that menu.
That said, the timeline. It’s very simple and straightforward, and it’s what I like most about Buzzie. You can see posts from the people you follow, together with profile pictures and thumbnails of pictures embedded in posts. If you tap on a post on the timeline you enter another screen with the single post and all the comments below. The UI is not very elegant here, but still it’s acceptable. There are some buttons in the bottom toolbar: one to mute or report as spam a user, one to open the user’s profile, other buttons to grab the links and pictures inside that post. I found the geolocation button pretty useless, because I don’t know what to do with it. I like the option to like posts by tapping on a the smiley face, it’s a great bookmarking solution.
The compose window is nice. You get this minimal screen which gives you a preview of your location on the right, and buttons to upload a picture, shorten links and change your address. You can also change the privacy settings to make a post private or public. Simple and elegant.
Overall, I like Buzzie. It’s not as polished and refined as a Twitterrific would be, but I guess that for the current status of Google Buzz that’s just fine. Available at $1.99 in the App Store.
