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).

[cellio]

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.

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

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

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