With the recent release of Buzz, Google learned the same lesson that Facebook and Peter Parker: With great power, comes great responsibility.
Google Buzz, Google’s new microblogging alternative to Twitter and Facebook, leveraged the power of Google to provide a ‘turnkey social network’ for Gmail users leveraging their address book and connectivity to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Blogger and Twitter.
The problem? Google didn’t anticipate the potential privacy issues that arise when you automatically connect people to others based on their email and chat usage.
This is a familiar story… reminiscent of December, 2009, when Facebook adopted a new privacy policy that declared certain information (such as friends lists) “publicly available” without privacy settings. It suffered a similar backlash.
Following a surge of recent complaints, Google has modified the service so that it merely suggests connections to users based on email use — instead of making connections automatically.
This makes Buzz more palatable for Gmail users. But will it make Buzz more popular? Not in its current state. Buzz remains an awkward adaptation of FriendFeed within Gmail. It allows you to view a lot of information from a variety of sources — but without much ability to customize, organize or filter.
It’s filled with too much noise.
A light buzz
Enjoy this parody of Google’s Buzz ad.
About Troy Janisch