Google Buzz

As everyone except two people in Montana know, Google Buzz premiered this week. It has of course received widespread coverage in the blogosphere because:

1. It's Google
2. It's embedded in Gmail, one of the most popular email offerings
3. It moves Google closer to a content aggregator, as opposed to a content provider

Buzz is not a great product but it is decent product. It does not replace TweetDeck or Google Reader and most of my Facebook friends have not found Buzz yet. Never the less it clearly moves Google into content aggregation, a subject which I have discussed here before. Who ever figures out content aggregation will have a terrific business assuming there is a way to monetize it (hopefully not through advertising banners or silly ads like FB). Google has not advanced the cause of content aggregation much with Buzz, but Gmail was not terrific at launch either. Gmail is pretty nifty now and I expect Buzz to improve a lot in the next 1-2 years.

What I would like to see in a content aggregator is all of the following features:

1. the ability to sort content by type, e.g. tweets, FB friend posts, posts from blogs I follow, etc
2. the ability to sort/filter a type of content, say tweets, by type (tweets, re-tweets, re-re-tweets) or by publisher
3. the ability to separate blog posts from comments on the blog
4. the ability to separate my content in a separate place apart from the general population of tweets, blog posts etc. that I get
5. the ability to sort content by person/publisher regardless of type

Many of these features exist in a limited form for one type of content but I want more flexibility for how I sort all the different sources of information. Maybe NewsGator could buy TweetDeck and combine the products in one application and add more filters to TweetDeck. Then I might have the content aggregator I need. I might even pay for the convenience.