Friday, February 19, 2010

Improving Google Buzz Subscriptions

Maybe someone at Google will stumble across this. Ah well, here goes:

Some of my friends/followers on here don't care or want to see everything that I end up publishing. For example, Carlos really has no interest in seeing what I share on Reader. But others might be interested in that stuff. I'm not claiming anyone is, but it's possible. Similarly, not everyone cares to read what I post on Twitter. Right now it's an all or nothing game. I could potentially make custom groups for each stream I publish... removing people from greoups when they don't want to be included, but that's a lot of hassle. I have no idea up front who cares about what.

There's an easy fix for this though. The publisher side doesn't really need any changes: let me publish my various streams, each with its privacy settings, just like I do now.  But on the subscriber side, give my followers a list of the streams being published, and let them filter the ones they don't want. Let them subscribe to any subset of what I publish. Then they can decide for themselves if they're interested in general buzz and flickr posts, but not my talk status or Reader shares.

With this capability, a subscriber can start out subscribed to everything, but then drop the streams that turn out to be of no interest or a bother.