Home Ex-Googler Creates Voting Site: “How to Fix Google Buzz”

Ex-Googler Creates Voting Site: “How to Fix Google Buzz”

How badly do people want Google Buzz fixed? Enough to submit over 7,000 votes in the first 24 hours since the launch of a Google Moderator page called “How to Fix Google Buzz.Google Moderator, for those that don’t know, is one of the unsung heroes of Google’s online services. Launched back in 2008, the tool offers a simply designed interface that lets participants vote ideas up or down. In this case, suggestions for Google Buzz features and bugs in need of fixing are the fodder for this new Moderator site.

The irony of the situation is that the new “How to Fix Google Buzz” site was created by Jyri Engeström, a former Google employee who was at one time tasked with “making Google more social.”

Before Buzz, There was Jaiku

If Engeström’s name rings a bell, it’s probably because you remember him as the co-founder and chairman of a social networking startup called Jaiku, acquired by Google in fall of 2007. Jaiku was a formidable microblogging service and one of the few that could have ever truly given rival Twitter a run for its money. With this service, you could update your status from both the web and your phone as well as aggregate and automatically publish stories from your other activity streams including blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, even yes, even Twitter updates.

If anything, Jaiku was a “proto-Buzz.” It was a FriendFeed before there was FriendFeed. It was FriendFeed mashed up with Twitter. It was one of the first to stream your social activities from around the web in an easy-to-read format that people could follow and reply to. It even had comments! And IM! In fact, you could argue that Jaiku was a better Buzz than the half-finished service Google launched just last week.

Unfortunately, Google let the original Jaiku service languish until eventually stopping its development entirely and open sourcing its code over on Google App Engine. Afterwards, in October of 2009, Engeström moved on to greener pastures. However, despite no longer working at Google, Engeström still clearly cares about Google’s social networking issues. This led him to create the “How to Fix Google Buzz” site.

“How to Fix Google Buzz” – Submit and Vote on Buzz Ideas

Using the new site is simple. Sign in, read the issue on the screen then vote “yes” or “no.” If you don’t have an opinion on that particular idea, you can click the skip button. As of right now, the number one request is an option to hide comments. It’s followed by other popular requests including lists, blocking improvements, filters and more. Plus, the nice thing about Moderator is that each idea has its own permalink so if you want to rally support behind your top feature request – like, say, the whole messed up, broken Google Reader integration, you can do so. Ahem, cough, cough.

Although Google Moderator makes aggregating and voting on Buzz ideas and issues simple, can we believe that anyone at Google is actually watching? Of course, we can’t know for sure, but when we asked Engeström if Google would look at this page, he only coyly responded, “trust me, they will.”

Image credit: ZDNet

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