Google Buzz Triggers Some Privacy Concerns
As predicted, last week Google launched Buzz, a Gmail-native social network built to potentially compete with Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately for the search giant, some excited users seem to have turned sour on Buzz because Google is still sorting out the systems’ privacy and usability features. Here are some perspectives.
To Buzz’s credit, it’s a snap to syndicate activity on any other Google-owned site like YouTube, Picasa, or Google Reader to your public feed. It can even automatically grab and repost your Twitter feed. This means that when I first clicked the “Buzz” link on the Gmail sidebar, my page was already full of content from my friends — which is actually one of its main problems.
The biggest lambasting Google has received over Buzz is its privacy settings (or lack thereof). When Buzz launched, all Gmail users were on the grid by default, and were automatically set to follow their closest friends’ updates. The issue was that it then made those contacts viewable to anyone who stumbled on your Buzz profile.
As far as usability goes, many users were put off by the fact that comments and replies to Buzzed items are copied to the Gmail inbox also by default, and it can quickly overwhelm your unread items if you don’t tweak your settings. And while this isn’t strictly Google’s fault, so many of my friends and colleagues are so firmly entrenched in Buzz’s competitors that my entire feed consists of syndicated content from elsewhere.
Moreover, clicking “Turn off Buzz” at the bottom of the Gmail window just removes it from your view without actually eliminating your presence on their social network. To Google’s credit, they’ve been rolling out changes to Buzz that makes the privacy settings more obvious, but a lot of goodwill has already been lost.
Google has announced that Buzz is coming to Google Apps Enterprise Edition, their resellable cloud collaboration and productivity suite, “within a few months.” A lot can happen between now and then, and Google is well-known for tweaking their products, constantly fine-tuning to perfection. But as it stands now, I’m wondering if any of Google’s channel partners actually want to deploy Buzz.
All this talk of social networking makes it as good a time as any to announce that you can now follow me on Twitter. Drop me an @reply and say “hi.”
Perhaps Google though it was time to return to the early myspace days where everyone’s profile was “public”. While it definitely sucked, I would have almost nothing to do in Buzz if I couldn’t ease drop on my neighbors. I actually felt sorry for some people who were engaged in private conversations, likely unaware that we could all see it.
If the features that worked on the mobile version worked at the desktop it would be a lot more useful.
I noticed this also when I started buzzing. I can even see other people’s buzz despite the fact that I don’t even know them. Good thing I didn’t use the buzz for any private or confidential conversations.
I hope Google can come up with the solutions soon.
Google has already committed that it is going to fix the problems very soon.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html
Google Watcher: Thanks for the update. Generally speaking, we’re intrigued to see where Google takes its various Google Apps next. We realize Google Buzz is beta, but critics were smart to raise the initial privacy concerns.
-jp
First they go mobile, then broadband, now trying this social media/network thing…it’s almost like Google’s throwing everything on the wall and seeing which one sticks.