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Google responds to Buzz whiplash, disables auto-follow

Posted by Daniel Shain

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Google has responded to waves of criticism over its new Buzz service, the most prevalent of which focused on the feature that caused all mail contacts to be automatically followed, a potential privacy violation. The changes seem to have mollified most objectors, though some remain unconvinced.

If you're like most of the 176 million Gmail users, last week on Tuesday you woke up and Buzz was just there. You didn't sign up for it. You weren't really prompted about it or directed to a page with much explanation or settings. I have to trust my memory here (a shaky proposal), but I recall there was basically just one pretty basic looking screen letting you know that Buzz was now active, along with some line about how it was a new way to share your life with friends.

And suddenly, everyone from your grandmother to your co-workers were best friends with you in a brand new social network, whether you wanted them to be or not. In many cases (in particular if you have a Google profile), the list of people who follow you and who you follow were made public, instantly revealing your email contacts list to the world at large.

While there are some cool features of Buzz, it's needless to say that people were upset about this. Frankly, I can't believe Google missed it. It's one of those things that makes me wonder if they really did, and takes some of the sheen off of Google's "good guy" armor.

I had friends opt out of Buzz because of this, but for some reason, it's not as easy to do as you might think. There is no tab for it anywhere in your settings. If you want to be without Buzz, scroll down to the bottom of the page for the tiny hyperlink next to "Gmai view" and select "turn off Buzz". I found it by doing a search for Buzz on my Gmail page - there's no way I would have thought to look there otherwise.

Google has addressed the primary concern and disabled the autofollow feature, replacing it instead with what they should have had all along - an "autosuggest" feature that you, the user, actually get to confirm. They will do the same with Picasa and Google Reader and be adding a tab to the settings page soon, and in the next two weeks users will see a more detailed guide pop up helping them through these changes.

I want to clap my hands and say, "thanks for listening Google, you guys are great!" - because they usually are. But the cynic in me thinks these changes are obvious and should have been implemented beforehand - is it really a surprise that people wanted to be prompted before having their personal information shared, and that there should be a settings tab so people can choose if and how much they want to share at all? There's no reason Buzz couldn't have waited a week to be launched with all this intact. The only benefit Google got is that it "accidentally" got tens of millions of people to sign up already whether they wanted to or not, and with any luck they a lot of them have already buzzed a bit and decided "hey, when this gets better I'll keep it," rather than seeing an actual choice to start and deciding "hey, why do I need another social network in my life?"

Not that Buzz isn't cool in a lot of ways. I'm still on it, and eagerly await the changes Google is making. And I recommend anybody who is curious to try it out yourself. But this isn't the first social network in the world here - Google should have known better, and probably did - I give Google enough smarts credit for that, at least.

What do you think? Am I off base, or do you have even deeper problems with Buzz than the ones I mentioned? As always, discussion is welcomed.

Via NYT

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