Like everyone, yesterday I got access to Google Buzz. And like most people, I’m scratching my head as to the whys and hows of it.

Personally, I really like the fact that it has mashed together bits of Google Wave (has anyone found a use for it yet?), Google Talk, and the comments feature of Google Reader. I like having a better way of viewing the comments on shared Google Reader articles, and as a lot of my contacts are fellow Gmail, I like having a group conversation space.

However, there’s are so many bad decisions to the product. The automatic opt in and auto follow feature is fraught. I ended up with a number of people following me who I had no idea who they were! It turns out they were people that I had contacted once in the process of making a purchase or contacting a help desk. Not people I wanted to keep in touch with! And the block option is not immediately obvious – you are required to actually view the persons profile and it’s in small, faint font there.

There there are the privacy issues which have been widely reported already. I certainly turned off the display followers option quicksmart.

The location features are interesting. I started using yesterday on my iPhone, and it automatically adds your current location (it wasn’t quite accurate for me, giving a street a few streets away). This is good for hyper local searches but it does open your buzz posts to the general public as one of my friends discovered this morning!

The forwarding of buzz comments to my inbox is slightly irritating. Why forward them there when the Buzz inbox is right below? It doesn’t make much sense. However this is at least fixed by setting up a filter to remove them straightaway.

Overall though, I don’t know that it will be something I continue to use. I already have twitter where I have group conversations (with the same people as on buzz), I already have the comments feature on Google Reader. I don’t really see a purpose for it as yet.

I will however keep using for a little while and see if I can find a place for it to fit.

I was lucky enough to get an invitation to Google Wave the other day, so I have been having a bit of a play with it to see what it is like.

My first impressions were that is a glorified chat room. Which is unfair, but that’s how it felt. You can chat in realtime with your contacts, to the point of even seeing their text as they write it.

However, that aside, it does have some great collaboration features. You can edit messages, both your own and other’s, which is useful but at the moment it is hard to know what was edited. The authors details change to include the names of everyone who has edited that message, but there is currently no way of knowing what they edited or what the text was previously.

It does have potential as a collaboration tool. You can attach files and images to messages as well as maps and other gadgets such as a voting tool. There is also a Sudoku gadget you can play if you’re that way inclined!

Personally, I don’t have any use for it at the moment. I wish I had had access back when I was at university, and completing group assignment after group assignment. It might have made communication that much easier.

For now though, I will keep experimenting and watching with interest any changes they make.

The Telegraph has a service (is it new? I’m not sure. I haven’t noticed it before, and it still seems a little unfinished, so I’m thinking it can’t be that old), where you can subscribe to a limited selection of news articles. They have created a few broad categories (sport, news, opinion, business, and so on) and have selected a number of resources that you can feed into an RSS stream. And, somewhat shockingly, they aren’t just recommended Telegraph columns, but things from all over the internet, including columns from their competitors (they offer feeds from the Times and the Guardian).

Now it is very limited (you can’t add in any other feeds, but can only select from what they have made available). And it is a little clunky (it’s all ajax, which I don’t really like as a functional platform – it’s too prone to slowness). But I quite like it nonetheless.

It feels to me like the gateway drug of RSS – not quite as hardcore as setting yourself up with feeds and a feedreader, but you can have a small selection of things to read. It’s the sort of thing you might suggest to your not-terribly-net-savvy parents, or to someone with limited English. You would move on from there to a real RSS reader – probably GoogleReader, as the format is somewhat similar. It’s enough to get you hooked on the crack that is RSS, but not so daunting as having to go out and actually track feeds down yourself. And I really like the fact that they’re not limiting themselves to Telegraph resources, but are expanding their options to other sources. I think it’s worth checking out.

Fluther and wis.dm are two new startups that are attempting to tap into the collective wisdom of crowds, asking the user base of the site to answer questions posed to the group.

Fluther is quite cute (it’s squid themed – how can you not like it?) and nicely designed (though I would rather the ‘ask a question’ box wasn’t quite so prominent, as it means I can barely see the questions posed on the front page). The questions asked here seem mostly serious – the sort of things you would ask, as the website puts it, if you had ‘five Uncle Franks to answer your car questions, eight Aunt Marthas to ask about astronomy and six Grandma Gerties to advise you on your garden dilemmas’. I would argue that this shares a lot of the same mental space as MetaFilter – most of the questions are things that you would see posed there, which arguably begs the question of why you wouldn’t just post to metafilter, with a much larger userbase?

wis.dm (as seen at Here we are. What now?) is a slightly different take on a question and answer site, requiring that questions be phrased as yes/no in an attempt to generate discussion. I can see this one being a little more popular, though a lot less useful. It’s very compelling to click on the little ajax-y buttons to answer questions, but far too much effort to click through and actually comment on something. I do wish the ratio of responses was shown on the front page though – I want to be able to see how the votes are swinging at a glance without having to click through. The questions on here are mostly vapid (‘Are you sitting in a swivel chair now?’) and I admit that I don’t really see the point – I can’t help but think that it’s another site that’s attempting to be a social hub, when people are pretty much social-site-d out at the moment.

I do, however, think it’s interesting that there are so many places on the internet where people go to get their questions answered. It seems like the sort of service that public libraries would want to be providing – indeed I’m sure there are one’s around that do, I admit that my knowlege of the progressive services that public libraries offer is limited. I think it’d be great though – a site where library users can pose a question to the librarians and users of their local library and have it answered in this sort of way – combining the resources of the library with the wisdom of the crowd, and creating a community feeling at the same time. Does anything like that exist at the moment, or am I being a bit optimistic?

After some time of protesting on my behalf, it seems that the inevitable has occured – I’ve been struck by the Twitter bug. I blame Twitbin, personally, for making it so damn easy for me to post, and so compelling to watch it refresh itself over and over again. There’s a certain balance point, it seems, once you’ve starting watching enough people to make it interesting, that you can’t seem to tear yourself away – it’s just this mini-conversation, playing away in the back of your mind.

I’m still not totally sold on it’s usefulness as a tool in libraries or in organisations, but it is a fantastic social networking tool, occupying that void between IM (too personal, too intrusive) and blogging (too much like hard work).

I’m here, by the by, should anyone be struck by the misplaced desire to listen to me witter about the cup of tea I’m drinking or the email I’m writing or whatever it is that I’m patently not doing, because obviously, the only thing I could be ‘doing right now’ is writing for Twitter :)

Oh! I nearly forgot to mention it! I’ve been playing about a bit with Joost this week, which I’m really quite enjoying. The content is relatively limited at the moment, but I expect that to grow with time. And what is there is quite interesting – lots of music channels, which I like a lot (I’m so out of touch with the Australian music scene!), and some fun things, like old cartoons and whatnot.

My biggest irritation with it is that there are some really interesting looking channels available on the American version, which we can’t get here. It really is a shame that something like Joost, which you would like to think wouldn’t be fettered by silly things like boundaries, still has location-limited content. Ah well. What there is is good though, and I’m quite enjoying what they have.

If anyone would like an invite to check it out, feel free to drop me a comment or email me at neohypatia at gmail, and I’d be more than happy to share them with you :)

You can’t escape it at the moment. Everyone’s talking about it. South by Southwest has been taken over by it. It’s the next biggest smallest thing in blogging – Twitter.

It’s the newest, trendiest kind of microblogging. Rather than having to post something of length (or interest) you can post quick snapshots of what you are doing. It comes across as a stream of consciousness babble of ‘what I’m doing right now’. And yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why? There’s no point! People will just be posting endless nonsensical streams of ‘Oh my cat just did the cutest thing!’ and ‘I’m going to bed now’. Which, to be fair, it is used for. But it can be used for so much more.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere of late talking about what libraries could be doing with Twitter, and what other applications people and organisations are using it for.

Libraryclips and Splashcast talk about applications for Twitter and the top tools for Twitter, and David Lee discusses library specific applications for it.

Here at micropersuasion, they have developed a basic Google search for Twitter, which could be useful, though I expect there’s an awful lot of content to be trudging through – you’d want quite a specific search!

It could be used for keeping track of what people are doing on a project, tracking what people are doing when working in disparate locations, keeping a personal running tally of reference questions, as a list making tool, a checklist, or just a way of communicating with your teammates.

If nothing else, it’s at the peak of the internet zeitgeist at the moment and it’s in our best interests to keep an eye on it. It might not have any lasting longevity – it might be one of those passing internet fads that have their hour in the sun, but it may not. It’s in the nature of these shiny new toys for them to gain popularity, and then gain more features, more functionality, more people writing hacks and tools and tips and tricks to integrate it into our work in ever more interesting ways. In a few years time, who knows how it might be being used? And in the meantime? It’s a pretty cool way of keeping track of what peoples cats are doing :)