Home Reshare: Google Buzz Gets a Retweet Button

Reshare: Google Buzz Gets a Retweet Button

Google Buzz just got a new feature that is very similar to Twitter’s retweet functionality. Over the course of the day, Google will roll out a Reshare button for Buzz, which will allow you to easily share interesting posts you find on Buzz with your followers there. These posts can be shared both publicly and privately. According to Google, this was one of the top user requests for Buzz. It is also a good example of the incremental updates the Buzz team has made over the last three months.

How Reshare Works

Just like on Twitter, whenever you re-share a post on Buzz, the software will create a new post in your stream. You can choose whether you want to share this post with all your followers or just with a select group of your friends. It’s important to note that this new feature will only work for public posts. Private posts in Buzz will not have the Reshare link.

Instead of editing a re-shared post like you can with Twitter’s old retweet method, Buzz allows you to add a note to the post, but you can’t edit the original.

As Todd Jackson, Google’s product manager for Gmail and Buzz, told us yesterday, the Buzz team decided that creating a new post and forking the conversation was the best way to go for now in order to give people the ability to have more focused and intimate discussions around shared items.

One interesting aspect of this new feature is that all the re-sharers’ names will appear on the original item, even if they are not connected to the original author. According to Jackson, Google decided to design this feature this way in order to allow users to find new and interesting people on Buzz.

Time to Give Buzz Another Try?

In our conversation, Jackson stressed the fact that the Buzz team has been listening closely to its users’ feedback and has introduced at least one new feature per week since Buzz launched in February. These updates range from better controls for Buzz in your inbox, to improved comment collapsing and the ability to disable comments. We have been very critical of Buzz in the past, but it is clear that Google is working hard to improve the product, and this constant stream of new features has already made Buzz a lot more fun to use.

In addition, Google invited thousands of Buzz users to take new features for a test drive before they were launched publicly. While we can’t tell you what these features are (everybody on the tester list is under a NDA), it is obvious that Google learned its lessons after the privacy debacle that followed the Buzz launch and is now actively soliciting feedback from a very diverse group of testers.

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