cellio | Google Buzz: bzzt!

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.

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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).

Silly me; I was being user-focused. I can't think of a single case where a user who bought (or signed up for) X will want to automatically and silently have Y pushed. Is this any different from companies that put you on their email lists just because you bought one thing once? From the company's point of view it makes sense, at least if you don't factor user/customer goodwill into it. Most users, especially of free services, will put up with a little of this kind of behavior, but it's hard to tell how much will push how many users away.

There's even a position between opt-in and opt-out that's likely to benefit companies: "we'll sign you up in a week if you take no action". Think of this as the book-club model where you have to send back the reply card to not get the selection.

Silly me; I was being user-focused.

Sadly, that's not silly, but appropriate. When(/if) companies discover that it will be incredible.

There used to be cases where it was nice, back in pre-internet days: you buy lots of games from this catalog, maybe you get mailings from some other catalog they opted you into. I found that to be very cool, because they were targetted and I had no idea those companies existed. In these days I think it is more an annoyance than a service.

The bool-club model.. I don't like it personally because I procrastinate and get burned. But that's my fault, and you're right, it's a balance. "We'll spam you this once but click on this link and we'll remove you from our database and not send your email to any other company" would be acceptable.

Just a small comment... "auto-opt-in" is actually a euphemism for "opt-out" :-)

Google did their psychic research and determined that, deep down, you really did want to be a part of their new and exciting service.

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)

...well, actually, sort of they have. There's a small link at the bottom when pictures are shown full-screen, now.

That link only hides Buzz. It does NOT disable it.

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.

They initially seeded your contacts (you didn't have to approve them) from your contacts, and the list of who is following you was public unless someone took action. They either have fixed or are fixing that. I could argue that either of those decisions in isolation was ok; however, they combine badly.

I don't know if it's dynamic. One of the changes they've announced is to not auto-follow but rather just suggest people you might want to follow (and you can check them off or not). That's benign; it means you have to take positive action.

Twitter: ugh. So the filtering is only at the publisher end (link in my Picasa albums, my Twitter, etc) and not on the receiving end? That's unfortunate, and maybe you should suggest an enhancement. If I were to use it I would want an easy way to skip over the Twitter feeds, just like I do on LJ. (The people I read who ship tweets here do it once a day and usually behind a cut, so it's easy to skip those posts. But if they come into Buzz one at a time, you're doomed.)

Twitter comes into Buzz one at a time, yes.

I hadn't previously attempted to filter them out, but just now going and trying to find a setting for it I could not do so. (There's an option to not hook up my Twitter account, but the obvious place for filtering other people only gives me an "unfollow" option with no finer granularity.)

Google Buzz: bzzt!

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Huh!

Re: Huh!

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