Google Buzz: bzzt!

[cellio]

When I started hearing about Google Buzz several days ago I mentally filed it under "could be interesting; look into it when you've got some time". Then in the last day or so I started hearing how they'd rolled it out. It sounds like the Buzz team made two decisions that were individually marginal and, in combination, terrible. The first decision was to automatically create links between you and your most frequent contacts. The second decision was to make links public by default. The privacy concerns here are pretty obvious, I trust.

A third decision was unambiguously (IMO) bad: they made it opt-out instead of opt-in. I am having trouble thinking of a single case where it would be a good idea to automatically, and without notification, make changes to existing accounts. [Edit: I meant good for the customer, and not counting things like "hey, we gave you more disk space". I mean new behaviors.] Auto-on for new accounts is quite defensible (with documentation); changing the behavior of accounts that people set up on the basis of a different implicit contract, no. Especially if you haven't previously sent out an update to your privacy policy.

There's one more problem with Buzz: opt-out doesn't really work. If you do the obvious thing and click on the "turn Buzz off" link, all that does is remove a shortcut. Your connections are still there. That's just bad engineering.

Google says they have heard the feedback and will fix things in a few days. And, while I can't verify this without a second account, some people believe that deleting your profile keeps Buzz at bay. [Edit: confirmed with the help of another gmail user, thanks.]

Buzz could, potentially, be a useful tool, though it remains to be seen whether the world really needed yet another attempt at a social-networking site. But their roll-out of it has left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm likely to wait a while, until I hear positive reviews from people whose opinions I value, before I touch it. And I'll have to be certain that they aren't publishing information that (otherwise) exists only in my mailbox. Linking to my public Picasa album is fine; it's public (same as the vast majority of this journal). Telling the world who I correspond with and how often, however, is not.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I am having trouble thinking of a single case where it would be a good idea to automatically, and without notification, make changes to existing accounts.

For the users, it is difficult to find reasons. For the parent company that is trying to launch something? I've seen auto-opt-ins happen quite often. If a user has to click on something to discover a feature they might not, but if it suddenly appears they will apathetically think "meh, whatever" (or, as the company hopes, be impressed).

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The settings panel they mention doens't exist for me, even if I turn on Buzz again.

Oh, and have they fixed the bit where it's a data sink, and doesn't play well with others? No. (grumble)

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Telling the world who I correspond with and how often, however, is not.

Wait, they're doing what? Is this just because they scooped your most frequent contacts for the initial follow-set, or are they automatically updating/exposing this in some way not clear just from looking at the Buzz page?


So, I don't dislike Buzz yet, but I'm not really enamored of it, mostly because it seems to add nothing new. (Also, it turns out that some people on my frequent contacts list have and use Twitter. I didn't know this. I also didn't want to know this, because IMHO Twitter is a totally useless form of "communication." It is, however, totally taking over the page because of its frequency.) I'm not, however, in the camp which objects to it being on by default--perhaps by design, it's not obtrusive enough (just a link under the Inbox link) to make me revolt and figure out how to turn it off.