As many Google Buzz users know, occasionally there are times when a discussion gains in popularity, it can collect comments. As the comments collect, they collapse only after you view them. But all the new ones stay open until you view them.  If a user doesn’t visit their stream for a while the popular posts can turn into a “skyscraper” post that takes over your entire screen. This gets old very quickly and can take time scrolling through all of the latest comments and new posts if a user hasn’t viewed their buzz stream lately. My account gets pretty jumbled quickly and I tend to get annoyed and do not go back and check out the old posts.

Today Google made changes to the way comments collapse in Google Buzz. That change is, if you there not there and there are a lot of comments the new comments will be collapsed as the old ones would be. Google announced that later today they would be releasing the new version.

How it will work

The changes to the comment system will limit how much screen space a post can take up. This will prevent the popular posts you are not interested in from taking over your stream. Images are from the Google Gmail Blog.

  • If there are 3 or more previous or new comments, we collapse them into a group.
  • We leave the latest previous comment (from before your last visit) expanded to give you context.

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    comment collapsing 1 thumb Google Improves Collasping Comments for Google Buzz

  • We leave the last two new comments (since your last visit) expanded so you can get a taste of the ongoing conversation and decide if you’re interested.
    comment collapsing 2 thumb Google Improves Collasping Comments for Google Buzz
  • If there are enough previous and new comments, we collapse them together into a single line to save space.
    comment collapsing 3 Google Improves Collasping Comments for Google Buzz
  • You’ll see the names of some of the people whose comments are collapsed, which can help you decide if you might    be interested in diving into the conversation.

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    (source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/)

    Conclusion

    I use Google Buzz but not daily. I use it when I do not have access to Twitter but other than that I rarely use Buzz as I would Twitter. Generally I use Buzz to to catch up on Twitter posts that I missed out from earlier in the day. Site such as  Mashable are on Buzz and I want to catch up on their updates quickly. The fastest way for me to do this is to use Buzz. I am looking forward to this change since most of the posts I follow on Buzz are  large and tend to become “skyscrapers”.

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