Tag Archives | social networking

Google has taken another pass at addressing privacy concerns over its new Buzz service. The big change involves the autofollowing feature that made lists of Buzz users’ most-contacted e-mail acquaintances public: The following is no longer quite so automated. Instead, Google will show new Buzz users a suggested list of people to follow, allowing users to follow all of them, some of them, or none of them.

I haven’t seen the revised Buzz startup process in action yet, but judging from the above screenshot, I’m not sure that Google’s done everything in its power to ensure that nobody will be startled by the contents of their public list of followers. Google still seems to pre-select people to follow rather than making you check them off yourself one by one. And it doesn’t explain on this screen that the list of people you follow will be public unless you suppress it.

Still, this is close to the solution I suggested in a post yesterday: Making the whole follow-your-friends process optional. The company says it’s also ending Buzz’s initial practice of automatically linking to activities in users’ Google Reader and Picasa accounts; from now on, you’ll have to turn on these options. And it’s adding a Buzz tab to Gmail’s settings to make it easier to tweak Buzz-related options.

It’s good to see Google prove so willing to perform major surgery to a new service so quickly. I’m not sure if this will quell all reasonable concerns about Buzz, but I hope so: The service is both promising and full of other quirks which I’d love to see Google get to work addressing.

It’s now been 72 hours since Google launched its Google Buzz social-sharing service and started rolling it out to Gmail users. Much of the coverage so far has been grumpy–especially when it comes to the fact that the initial list of people you autofollow on Buzz is based on who you talk with most often in Gmail, and that list is public unless you choose to make it private.

To its credit, Google has responded swiftly to complaints: It’s already tweaked Buzz to make it more obvious what information the service is making public, and to help you crank up the privacy settings.

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What’s the most common first tweet that Twitter newbies make? That’s easy: “Trying out Twitter” and variants thereof. Nearly everybody who joins the service starts out in a mode that’s experimental, confused, and–for the rest of us–tedious. Which is okay, because on any given day, only a small percentage of tweets come from beginners.

Of course, there was a time when every Twitter user was a new Twitter user, but it was long before most of us had heard of the service. In fact, at the time it wasn’t even Twitter–it was Twttr.

Google Buzz, however, is different. Google could have launched it as a closed beta a la Google Wave or Google Voice, Instead,  the company decided to skip tryouts and go straight to Broadway, by opening the service up to every Gmail user over the next few few days. To a degree that’s really unusual in the history of the Web, Buzz will be chockablock with millions of confused newcomers all at once. Expect “trying out Buzz” and similar sentiments to be the primary form of Buzzing at first.

I still have access to Buzz only on my iPhone, not via Gmail. I’m only following a few people, and the majority of them haven’t buzzed at all yet. So almost all the buzzes I’ve read so far have been on the Web version’s “Nearby” tab, which simply uses your coordinates to show you updates from people in your general vicinity. A few of them are saying things that are at least vaguely interesting–or, at least, are alerting us to their eating activities. But yup, buzzing at the moment seems to mostly be about Buzz.

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I’m through with declaring any tech product or service to be a “killer” of any other tech product or service. But I will say this: If Twitter is found dead anytime in the next couple of years, someone’s going to need to hide Google Buzz, which debuted this morning, from the police.

Buzz seems to have most all the features that Twitter is missing, and Google is clearly going to take advantage of all the benefits of being Google to make it popular–most notably the inboxes of unspecified millions of Gmail users who’ll get Buzz as a service-within-the-service. My impression is that Google really, really wants this to be the dominant service in the still-evolving category of “that thing that Twitter does that doesn’t have a good name yet.”

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