Google Buzz buttons

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

We've seen lots of people using Google Buzz to share interesting links from around the web. To do so, you had to copy and paste the link from one browser window to another — there weren't buttons that made it easy to post to Google Buzz without leaving the site you're on. Savvy sites like Mashable and TechCrunch quickly got creative and implemented their own Buzz buttons, using Google Reader as the backend. But not every site owner should have to hack together their own version of these buttons (and not everyone who uses Buzz also uses Reader), so this morning we're making copy-and-paste Buzz buttons available for anyone to use.

Starting today, you'll see these buttons around the web on participating sites including: The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Glamour, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace, GigaOM, PBS Parents, PBS NewsHour, The Next Web, TweetDeck, SocialWok, Disqus, Vinehub, and Buzzzy. Mashable and TechCrunch have updated their sites to use these new buttons too.


A number of sharing platforms, including ShareThis (pictured below), Meebo, Shareholic, AddThis and AddtoAny have also incorporated the Google Buzz button into their sharing functionality, so you'll see Buzz listed as a choice when you go to share something on many other sites around the web as well.


If you want to add Google Buzz buttons to your site, just go to buzz.google.com/stuff, configure your buttons with a couple clicks and copy a few lines of JavaScript. Paste this code where you'd like the Buzz buttons to appear and you're all set.


And if you'd like to promote your own Google Buzz account, we have a button for you, which allows people to follow you on Buzz right from your blog or website. Here's an example using the Google Buzz team's own Buzz account (clicking it will take you to the Buzz team's profile page and from there you can easily follow our team's posts):

Follow on Buzz

You can grab that button code from buzz.google.com/stuff as well.

Improved comment collapsing for Google Buzz posts

Posted by Sean McBride, User Experience Designer

Any Google Buzz post can turn into a lively discussion. Sometimes these conversations can gather lots of new comments very quickly, turning them into "skyscraper" posts that can dominate your entire screen, especially if you don't check Buzz for a few days. We've heard from many of you that these big posts can be a lot to skim over.

Today, we’re making some changes to how comments get collapsed in Google Buzz. In the past, old comments were sometimes collapsed, but new comments (posted since your last visit to the Buzz tab) were always expanded. Now, if there are enough of them, new comments may be collapsed as well. Here’s the nitty gritty on how it'll work by the end of the day once we finish rolling out these changes:

• If there are 3 or more previous or new comments, we collapse them into a group.


• We leave the latest previous comment (from before your last visit) expanded to give you context.
  
  


• We leave the last two new comments (since your last visit) expanded so you can get a taste of the ongoing conversation and decide if you’re interested.
  
  


• If there are enough previous and new comments, we collapse them together into a single line to save space.
  
  


• You'll see the names of some of the people whose comments are collapsed, which can help you decide if you might be interested in diving into the conversation.

These changes will limit how much space any one post can take up in the Buzz tab and prevent the popular posts you’re not interested in from dominating the stream. We hope this helps make Google Buzz a little less noisy so you can focus on conversations you care about.

Better controls for buzz in your inbox

Posted by Bruce DiBello, Software Engineer

When you participate in a conversation in Google Buzz, we bring that post to your inbox to make it easy to keep up with the discussion. But we’ve heard loud and clear that buzz in your inbox can get noisy — we feel it too, so today we're launching two features to help with this:

1) Settings to control what gets sent to your inbox
From the Buzz tab of Gmail Settings, you’ll be able to choose whether the following buzz items get sent to your inbox:

• Comments on your posts
• Comments on posts after you comment on them
• Comments on posts after you are @replied on them

2) Explanations for why posts get sent to your inbox and an easy-to-find “Mute” link
You'll see a new message at the top of each post in your inbox that explains why it’s there: someone commented on your post, you were @replied, etc. We’ve also added an easy-to-find “mute” link that will stop subsequent comments from bringing the conversation back to your inbox.



These are just the first in series of features designed to help control the noise level in Google Buzz, so stay tuned for more. If you have ideas for Google Buzz you'd like to share with the team, you can post your ideas and vote for others on our official Product Ideas page.