BuddyBuzz
BuddyBuzz is described as the fastest way to read news on your cellphone. Created by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, it gives you access to tech news luminaries such as Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Ross Mayfield as well as various others. You can also create your own collections with My Buzzbox, and upload and share articles. In Digg-like style, BuddyBuzz predicts the articles you’ll prefer based on how you’ve ranked previous articles. I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but in my first experiments, here are a few off-the-top impressions:
Pretty cool …
Clean, simple interface – after you activate it, the interface appears somewhat similar to a news ticker except instead of a horizontal stream that runs along the bottom of the screen, it simply displays one word at a time in quick succession. If you want to pause, then you simply hit the pause button.
Look Ma, no scrolling – one nice advantage to this simple word-stream is that it requires no scrolling; this can be a real advantage when you consider how reading news with the typical, small cellphone screen can be pretty scroll-heavy.
Perhaps, less than ideal …
Lack of speed control – because the word-stream moves at a pretty rapid clip, some users might prefer to adjust the speed settings and still feel like they’re getting all the speedy advantages that BuddyBuzz aims to deliver.
No visuals – one disadvantage of the simple, word-stream display is that you won’t see the graphs, images, or photos that would typically accompany a news piece (unless it’s hidden under some menu option that I didn’t see in my initial experiments with it). But maybe the BuddyBuzz creators figure that if speed is the primary draw, then visuals is something that users can easily and logically expect to do without.
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Ross Mayfield, BuddyBuzz, Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab