If you were to peek around the shoulders of your coworkers as they opened Gmail, it would seem that more often than not the little Buzz tab has a sad number next to it: 100+. That is the maximum unread messages that Google will alert you of having.
For many more the real number is in the thousands, they just don’t check Buzz like the did when it launched. Social aggregation and curation startup Cliqset is out to change that by more than just integrating Buzz into their product, which they have started to do today, but also by making it pretty.
That matters more than you might guess. Go into Gmail and open up Buzz. Look at it, there is good information to be had, but it is not laid out in an attractive format. Take a look at what Cliqset has done with what you see there:
Quite the upgrade if you ask me. Cliqset adding another service to the now more than 80 that it integrates with is just another step for the company as they tune their product, but with Buzz it is something altogether different. Both Buzz and Cliqset have a similar struggle: strong technology that is not quite matched with equivalent user activity.
Although Cliqset’s traffic has grown and found much larger stable rates, it is still a fraction of the giants it integrates with like Twitter. Buzz has a core user group, but finds itself in a similar boat. Perhaps with Cliqset’s new integration and upgrade of the Buzz experience the two will rise together. They both need it. Will the pretty that Cliqset is bringing to the table be enough? We will have to wait and see.
Buzz is also launching mobile web applications today that you can find and access on your Android and iOS phones at m.cliqset.com.
Cliqset has some of the best tools online to take in social streams and sort them. Perhaps Buzz integration will be the spark they needed to light their afterburners and put up the growth numbers that we all want to see. If you haven’t yet, you can sign up for Cliqset here and play around with the rather ace built in Buzz tools.
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