Google has already apologized for some of the problems with Google Buzz. One of those being Buzz automatically followed some users, a big no-no. The company may have said it was limited to people you emailed frequently, but that wasn’t the case for most of us.

Aside from that, Buzz has mixed reviews and a long list of things that need changing. I’ve listened. I’ve participated. I’ve complained. Yet, Buzz still has my attention. Like an infant, it has cute moments and messy ones. It still needs nourishing before determining what it will be when it grows up.

Using Buzz

Because I always have Gmail open, the growing number of new Buzz is distracting as it grows much faster than email even in spite of my being very selective about who I follow. I’m organized when it comes to my email and maintain inbox zero. It’s easy to see why the new Buzz messages annoy and frustrate people especially when the number climbed to 100.

It took a week to get used to that in the same way I let my newsletters and alerts labels sit with over 100 new messages. Those two labels have hundreds of new messages because those messages are “as needed” messages. So I applied the concept to Buzz and the annoyance factor dropped. Or I click “Buzz” and the number starts over.

Although some folks said they turned off Buzz soon after trying it out, I haven’t written it off because it’s new and evolving. First, I want to understand it better and figure out how to use it efficiently should it find its way. Twitter wasn’t a smash hit in the beginning. Neither were blogs. Facebook was limited to college students. Second, I’m stricter about the people I follow in Buzz than I am in Twitter. If I find someone I follow is Buzzing a lot of useless content, then I stop following without regret.

I haven’t decided if it’s a good idea to funnel my tweets into Buzz. I don’t blog daily, so tweets keep me out there. I’ve created new Buzz a couple of times and comment on Buzzworthy items. I haven’t tried using Buzz for any articles I write.

One-way Interaction

Buzz can import your blog entries, tweets and other content. However, if you reply to any of these, they stay right in Buzz. Well, when I see a tweet from Twitter in Buzz, I go in Twitter and reply there instead of within Buzz. Google lost an opportunity here. What if Google adds a checkbox that asks if I want the reply to go to the original source. Hence, if the source is from Twitter, the reply shows up in Twitter.

Google likely did it this way on purpose to keep people in Buzz. But some will go around it like I did. I hardly think I’m the only one to think of this.

Yes, Facebook lets you import the same information and keeps replies right inside Facebook. I just expect more from Google because many of Facebook’s users don’t use other social media applications.

Twitter Fail Whale = Buzzportunity

Recently, Twitter experienced serious fail whaling. People asked if Twitter was failing in Facebook and Google Buzz. Buzz was a better place to find out than Facebook. Again, so many people in Facebook don’t touch Twitter or any other social media. Those of us in conversation mode buzzed about other things knowing Twitter whaled out.

Multi-communication Integration

I don’t think Google, Facebook and Microsoft are onto anything in combining status/buzz with email. (Facebook is trying to build up email to become a powerhouse like Gmail.) When I want Twitter updates, I go receive them and nothing else. Not email. Not trivia. Not games. Nothing. Just short status updates and direct messages (DM). Of course, I could be wrong about this.

Buzz integration with email doesn’t work for many. It creates more noise and people haven’t come to the point where they want multi-communication opportunities thrown at them. They would rather have a choice, but a choice that goes beyond turning off Buzz. Perhaps, a way  to access Buzz outside of Gmail.

I remember when Newsgator would deliver feeds as Outlook email. I never liked that idea. When I tried it briefly, it overwhelmed me more than Buzz because it took more effort to delete those messages.

Social Media Expert: Is There Such a Thing?

Buzz demonstrates exactly why no one can be an expert in social media. Social media evolves and fast. New things pop up. You can’t become an expert on what works and doesn’t work as soon as it comes out. You have to see how people respond to it as they learn their way around.

Nonetheless, Google has accomplished one thing for itself — Buzz keeps people in Gmail longer as several have admitted this.

What do you think lies ahead for Google Buzz and unborn social media?

Related articles

• 10 Things You Should Know About Google Buzz (eweek.com)
• 30+ Google Buzz How Tos, Tools and other Resources (SEOptimize.com)
• Google Buzz No Facebook , No Twitter Killer, Google Exec Says (eweek.com)

Al Kaplan, 1953

My dad passed away two years ago. Today would have been his 79th birthday.

Nominate a favorite social media book.

If you receive this post by email, please tell me what’s the best time of the day you’d like to receive these. It used  to go out in the mornings, but I felt overwhelmed by emails in the morning and thought late afternoon / early evening would be better. It doesn’t mean that’s the best time for you. Just reply and let me know. Thank you for reading!

Brain food…

• How to Read a Non-fiction Book: If you want more — The Little Book to Your Well-Read Life is the best book I’ve read about reading books.
• Musings on a Memoir, a Movie and a Two Billion Dollar Story Model: I’ve added Open to my must read list and viewed the captioned trailer of Edge of Darkness.
• 8 Blogs About Book Covers and Book Design: I confess. I never read The Phantom Tollbooth because of its cover. I just finished reading it. I’m glad I waited to read it until now when I am a bigger verbivore today than when I was a kid.
• Product Launches Should be a Big Deal: Don’t let post title fool you. It’s an excellent critique of a Microsoft presentation. Great lesson for the presenters in all of us.
• Publishers: Why Are You Creating Huge Followers for Those Who Might Soon Be Putting You Out of Business: Excellent read from Christina Katz on the partnering (or not) of publishers and authors. I’d love to know what you think. I’m still listening, learning and assessing.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• 12 Most Creative Candles: When I was a kid, I made egg candles from a crafts book I had. Probably the only thing I tried.
• 10 Interesting Edibles from the Fancy Food Show: Interesting is the right word.
• How to Use a Semicolon: A comical look at ; [Link: Writer's Digest]. You can also take the Twitter spelling test.
• Movies in Longshot: Comics with dot characters.
• Australia and Stupid Tourist Questions: Should we bring cutlery? [Link: Andy Hayes]
• Replacing World Landmarks with Souvenirs: Clever [Link: Mark Hurst]
• SimplyNoise: White noise for when you need it.

TechCrunch reports that Microsoft calls its next operating system (the one after Vista) Windows 7. Mickey comments:

I’d love to see them start using logical numbers again, but it doesn’t add up:

Windows 3.1 (“Windows 3″)
Windows 95 (4)
Windows 98 (5)
Windows ME/2000 (6)
Windows XP (7)
Windows Vista (8)
Windows 7 (9?)

I guess maybe if you call Windows 3.1 “Windows 1″ (since that was the first one that was any good), then it increments to the next version being 7.

This makes me wonder if Microsoft was influenced by Seinfeld’s George’s liking of “Seven” as a name for a kid. Hey, Jerry was in the commercials… so the connection could be there.

Numbers work most of the time in the software business, but not for many others. If Microsoft sticks with Windows 7 and proceeds to follow it with 8, 9, 9.5 (Photoshop 5.5 was a biggie) then it should work out fine as it has for Explorer 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Look at Firefox — 1.x, 2.0, 3.0. Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. But then Apple had to go and confuse us with Mac OS X Leopard (it’s Mac OS 10.5).

But for other industries, number names get lost especially in the automobile industry. I’m trying to come up with a couple of examples of cars using numbers (other than what I drive — guilty of a “letters and number” name with no words) and they’re not coming to me or I am not sure if I remember right (“Is it 30 or 31? Audi or Infiniti? Or maybe Lexus.”).

Yet, I can identify an Expedition and Suburbans and can tell you who makes each one (Ford and Chevy in that order). So is a GLX better than an LX because it has an extra letter? But what if it’s an SL? Which one is better? LX or SL? Some cars use names like Sport, Touring, Grand Touring. So is Sport the fully-loaded one or Grand Touring?

Good thing we couldn’t have had a V9 or V12. How would we distinguish those from a V8 other than they might contain more vegetables? Good thing the company stuck with V8 and expanded its product line around that name.

I’ve always thought telephone companies with initials just didn’t sound as powerful as those with a word or two in their names (MCI Worldcom does not count). Verizon and Cingular smartly dumped their initialized company names for memorable ones. Of course, Cingular went away with the merger and returned to initials.

Tried to find other articles on the topic, but with keywords like brand, number, names… not an easy task. Did find one good one: Counting on Your Brand’s Name.

What do you think of brand names with numbers and letters? Sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t? Doesn’t work without at least one identifier (like Windows or Explorer)?

How many times did you complete a form only to push the “Clear” button instead of “Submit”? What about “OK” vs. “Cancel” on a popup window? (Raises both hands — one for each.)

Why does this happen? Do we expect one button on the left and the other on the right? Are they too close together?

Jakob Nielsen reports that Windows applications put OK first, Cancel second while Apple places OK last. In this case, he advises developers to design OK/Cancel based on the platform they design for. The above screen shot comes from Thunderbird in Windows. The below image comes from Microsoft Word.

For Web forms, I suggest using one button. Of course, circumstances may prevent that. For example, you’re completing an order and you’re on the last page. Ecommerce sites certainly don’t want to give you another button to cancel the order, but users need assurance that they’ve canceled the order by pressing “Cancel Order” rather than just closing the window.

From my experience, I tend to read popup windows and zip through Web-based forms. I always assume software developers don’t create their popup windows the same way. But online forms — that’s another story. Silly, isn’t it? We shouldn’t expect Web designers to create forms the same way either.

Here, Nielsen gives two guidelines that make sense:

• Name a button based on what it does. Instead of “OK,” consider “Yes” when the dialog box asks if you want to do something.
• Highlight the most often used button except in cases where the action is drastic (of course, I can’t think of an example at the moment).

I think one more guideline would help especially where Web-based forms come in:

• Avoid putting the buttons close together: This forces us to pay attention and lowers the incident of “mouse slippage” that causes us to accidentally select the wrong button.

Many of us hit “Enter” when we finish a form or to begin searching (after entering keywords). Take care to prevent the application from executing something big when someone presses “Enter.”

You have to give Microsoft credit for its Windows XP shut down dialog box as shown below. Three options appear (Stand By, Turn Off, Restart) and each in a different color (yellow, red, green respectively) plus a Cancel button in gray and away from the others.

As users, we should look closely these windows and form buttons. In our fast-paced and overloaded world, we forget. Hence, keeping buttons at a reasonable distance from each other can give us the visual cue to look at the buttons.

What works for you? What doesn’t work?

As if the daylight savings time change wasn’t enough to contend with, Microsoft picked a bad page to have a typo. A page that many people have been accessing. What’s verion? What happens when you get two verions?

Also found this typo on a kids sports program information page. Do we get to take two classes for free? What class complements this one?

The Microsoft Office Team reports that Microsoft has added 58,000 words to the US English dictionary including the following:

* Possessives, i.e. the possessive form of words that already were in the lexicon
* The most frequent male, female and last names from the 2000 Census data and other sources. Examples: Brianne, Britta, Carissa, Carolyn, Carmela
* Company names, such as Verizon, WorldCom
* Names of autonomous Native American governmental units
* Names of the official UN countries, as well as most languages in our market areas, e.g. Indic language names
* Place names, such as all world capitals and other major cities, e.g. Wuppertal
* Miscellaneous words that were missing from the lexicon: e.g. Camus, Wyeth, Woolf

Office 2007 also comes with a new feature Microsoft refers to as contextual spelling. It watches for correctly spelled words that aren’t the right word based on the sentence. We all do this. I know the difference between your and you’re; too, to, and two; and their and there — it I’ve caught myself typing the wrong word many times. Why does this happen? I guess we get a word in our heads and our fingers spew out the wrong word.

If you write, “You’re shoe is untied,” Office 2007 will mark “you’re” as an error. Nice feature to have! Even us grammar geeks make mistakes and sometimes we don’t see it when proofing.

I needed to get a new mouse or desktop set (keyboard and mouse) because the Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 was working erratically — I had to work hard to use the buttons. I tried upgrading the software, putting in fresh batteries, and pushing the connect buttons. Nothing worked. Time for a new mouse.

First, I tried just replacing the mouse with Microsoft Comfort 3000. Ha. It was not more comfortable than the Intellimouse and my arm immediately became numb. So back to the store.

Next, I tried the corded Intellimouse. The cord drove me crazy and I couldn’t get it situated where it didn’t feel like it tugged whenever I moved it. I guess I’m sensitive to the slightest movement or change in how something feels.

Finally, I decided to chuck the whole thing and get the Logitech LX 700 keyboard and mouse set after reading up on different ones. The mouse doesn’t work for me — it feels backwards compared to the Intellimouse.

But the keyboard has nice features not on the Microsoft keyboard. The keys have a nice feel when tapping on them. On the left are three buttons: close window, enter, and switch programs. I immediately liked those. Above these is a sort of a mini-trackball with two buttons except it rolls up and down instead of all around. It also clicks sideways. This is not a substitute for the mouse as I couldn’t get around with it while the mouse was charging.

The mouse comes with rechargeable batteries and its own charger, which is also the home base for the wireless. At first, I thought it would not work well because every time it needs to be charged, I’d have to stop using the mouse while it charges. But it doesn’t take long to charge and it’s better than trashing batteries or constantly switching out rechargeables.

The Logitech, like Microsoft, has programmable buttons. Except, when I program a button to open a folder, it opens it in the view I don’t like (shown on the left). I prefer the Folders view (shown on the right). It’s another click to get to that view.

I also don’t like the messages when I click on a programmable button. It’s like seeing old DOS messages (“downloads” below is an example). When I first loaded the Logitech (prior to installing the software) and changed the volume, it had a more modern look. That disappeared as soon as I installed and upgraded the software. So I turned off the on screen messages.

Microsoft’s keyboard has a nice, smooth feel on its hand rest while Logitech’s is plastic. Microsoft’s mouse also had the same smooth feel with just enough friction so your thumb didn’t slip. Logitech has a smooth plastic feel, but better than the Microsoft Comfort 3000, which was slippery as heck.

I liked Microsoft’s scrolling buttons better as they were smooth like oil while Logitech’s and others clicked.

I got my first low-battery warning and the battery icon flashed in the system tray. The mouse went home for the night so its batteries get recharged. The next day, it was charged. But how am I supposed to know that? When it goes on the charger, the light immediately turns green and stays green. To make matters worse, the flashing system tray warning continued to flash even though the software indicated the batteries were fully charged.

Microsoft’s desktop set didn’t last anywhere as long as Logitech’s as I had a wireless Logitech set prior to the Microsoft. It was one of the earlier wireless desktop sets and yet, it lasted longer than the newer one.

I tried searching Logitech’s support forums about the screen message and the open folders annoyances, but nothing there. I haven’t decided if I want to stick it out with the Logitech and see if my arm gets used to the mouse or order a replacement mouse and put comfort first.

I submitted the rebate so that means I’m keeping the Logitech set since my hand finally got more comfortable with the mouse.

You use Ctrl+Alt+Del to see what’s running on your PC, to close crashed programs and processes, and to check performance. You probably avoid a few processes whose names mean nothing to you, but they’re essential to Windows. svchost.exe sure likes to appear all the time and multiple times at that. What’s taskmgr.exe? Oh yeah, it’s the window you’re looking at right now. ctfmon? Is he related to Pokemon? navapsvc.exe? Navy? Napa Valley? Navel? NOTA (none of the above).

This is not a comprehensive list as that would take days. It has the standard processes as well as process names from popular applications. If you want to know about a process, the best place to go is… ProcessLibrary.com. Just like adware and spyware, there are bad processes that come to life thanks to the bad guys like Trojans and viruses. The site has a list of the top five security threats, so watch out for those processes.

acrotray.exe

Acrobat Assistant that is used when printing documents to a PDF. The process should not be removed while converting documents to PDF.

ADService.exe

Active Disk Service is a component of the Iomega zip drive.

AppServices.exe

Also for the Iomega zip drive.

ccEvtMrg.exe

Associated with Symantec’s Internet Security Suite. Keep it and protect your PC.

ccSetMgr.exe

Also associated with Symantec’s Internet Security Suite. Keep it and protect your PC.

csrss.exe

System process that is the main executable for the Microsoft Client / Server Runtim Server Subsystem. It should not be shut down.

ctfmon.exe

non-essential system process. If you’re using only English as the language, then it is not needed. However, it’s recommended to leave it alone.

explorer.exe

This must always be running in the background. It’s a user interface process that runs the windows graphical shell for the desktop, task bar, and Start menu.

iexplore.exe

Internet Explorer browser. But why are you using it unless it’s for a site that doesn’t work in any other browser? Use Firefox instead.

lsass.exe

Local Security Authority Service is a Windows security-related system process for handling local security and login policies.

Navapsvc.exe, nvsrvc32.exe, and navapw32.exe

These are Symantec’s North AnvtiVirus processes. They or whatever virus program you use should run all the time.

realsched.exe

RealNetworks Scheduler is not an essential process. It checks for updates for RealNetworks products. It can be safely disabled.

rundll32.exe

A system process that executes DLLs and loads their libraries.

savscan.exe

Nortons AntiVirus process. Keep it.

services.exe

An essential process that manages the starting and stopping of services including the those in boot up and shut down. Do not terminate it.

smss.exe

Session Manager SubSystem is a system process that is a central part of the Windows operating system. If you try to kill it, it will be difficult… hence, the importance of leaving it be.

spoolsv.exe

Microsoft printer spooler service handles local printer processes. It’s a system file.

svchost.exe x 6

You may have more than six appearances of this process or less. It’s there multiple times to handle processes executed from DLLs. Leave it there.

System

This is a file that stores information related to local hardware settings in the registry under ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’. Kill it and kiss your PC’s stability bye bye.

System Idele Process

calculates the amount of CPU currently in use by applications. This won’t go away no matter how hard you try. Don’t try it, OK?

taskmgr.exe

Appears when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del.

wdfmgr.exe

Windows Driver Foundation Manager is part of Windows media player 10 and newer. Better not to stop the process.

winlogon.exe

Handles the login and logout processes. It’s essential.

winword.exe

The great Carnac says, “You’re running Microsoft Word.”

Don’t panic if you see something you have on the “bad guy” list. svchost.exe is important, but some are good guys and some are bad guys. Do your research before deleting anything. For instance, I have admin.exe, which has been reported as a bad guy. However, it is the admin process for one of my programs. When I closed the program, admin.exe also went away.