6 ms·

Google Buzz? More Like Buzz Kill

93 points by razorburn 17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago
Indeed, after taking a quick look at Buzz, I scrolled down to the bottom of gmail and clicked "turn off buzz". Who needs more of this stuff in their life?
- gcampbell 17y ago
  I'm pretty annoyed that my kids' email accounts suddenly turned into a social networking site - there's a reason I don't let them have Facebook accounts.
  - dbz 17y ago
    This is the first valid complaint I have read. Although I don't agree with your views, I do understand them, and I appreciate the fact that you didn't talk about problems which can be easily fixed by an off button.
    - gcampbell 17y ago
      Which of my views do you disagree with? Prior to yesterday, GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell. Now it's far too easy for that child to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire Internet.
      - dbz 17y ago
        I believe that instead of stopping one's kids from giving out personal information (unless they have a disorder- then it may be necessary), one should teach his or her children what is appropriate: to speak and to write => in public and in private- to family - to friends - to acquaintances - to strangers. All of that should be taught. Show the child why things are bad rather than simply stopping them. If your child doesn't listen, then more extreme measures of censorship should come into play.
        blogimus 17y ago
        Keywords: "taught" "show" "listen" "learn" Let's turn this around a little bit: I believe that instead of automotive safety belts, we should all just teach people to drive slower and more cautiously. That we we are not encumbered by restrictive seat belts. Reasonable? Takeaway: Take everything that you just said and then add parental controls on top of it because children really do need boundaries while they learn to think for themselves and hopefully make good decisions. Yes. I am a parent.
        dbz 17y ago
        =] Very interesting point; however, I must completely disagree. In a car you are entrusting your life to other drivers, but in sharing information about yourself, you are entrusting yourself. I'm trying to say "You have no control over others, but you have control over yourself" which is why I view your point as incorrect- yet interesting.
        oscardelben 17y ago
        What you said is true, but children are not responsible fot themselves until they reach a certain age, the parent is responsible for them.
        SlyShy 17y ago
        That kind of thinking is a great way to bring up children who remain irresponsible for their own behavior. Growing up I was responsible for everything I did, and now I'm quite tired of college classmates who still haven't learned to take accountability for basic things.
        oscardelben 17y ago
        Yes but at 12 you may not be able to reason with your head, and if you do something you are not supposed to do, your parents will pay for it, so they're still responsible for you. It's the law (at least where I live).
      - buster 17y ago
        While true, that there is a risk to expose personal information to the internet you probably should start to educate your kids in internet usage and not deny them. You sentence "GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell" shows that you are still living in the 20th century. "As far as i can tell" means "i didn't ask them but i don't use facebook and email works, so it works for them too". Did you really ask your kids if their friends communicate over social networks? You probably did miss it (too busy complaining and fearing?) but social networks are overtaking mail. You don't expect your kids to write their friends mail when everyone else is writing messages in facebook, do you? You will see, that your kids will get access to facebook/whatever anyway, if not only out of despite. One of many sources: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popular-than-email/ http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popula... I beg you: Start educating your kids soon, if you have concerns, but don't forbid them!
        gcampbell 17y ago
        I see nothing wrong with allowing my kids to use social networking sites once I feel confident they're mature enough to accept the responsibility for managing their own privacy (and, in fact, my older child does already, although only on sites that allow pseudonyms for now). My observation is simply that use of email requires an entirely different understanding of privacy concerns than use of Twitter or Facebook, and that the default settings Google Buzz sets up are neither especially obvious (I had to hunt around for a while to figure out what was actually displayed to the public via Google Profile) nor what I would recommend for a minor. Again: I have no problem with educating my children about the proper use of social networking sites. I simply don't appreciate being forced to do so by a service which they've been able to use without these sorts of concerns since they were old enough to read.
      - dtf 17y ago
        It's easy to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire internet using email. Claire Swire, Peter Chung, Trevor Luxton and countless others can vouch for this. The point-to-point nature of mail communication (and text messaging for that matter) gives an unfortunate illusion of privacy, yet publication and mass replication are only a couple of clicks away. Posting on openly public sites such as Twitter and Facebook actually forces a lot more careful consideration up front. The sober reality is that you and your children should be treating the private emails you send in the same manner.
        timthorn 17y ago
        Unfortunately, posting on openly public sites doesn't force more careful consideration - only the poster can do that. I've heard too many people opine that they don't care who sees their posts yet share really private information.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        What happens when they get old enough to make such a decision for themselves and find themselves unprepared? Education > protection. (and this is from someone who was given extremely limited web access till the age of about 16 - and then promptly did some very silly things.... so take it from experience :))
  - derefr 17y ago
    I understand the complaint, but in this day and age, that's like being annoyed that your microwave and VCR have clocks. Everything is a social networking site now. I had to think for a minute in order to not include some form of profiles and user-to-user messaging in the last app I wrote. I think it's just a generation gap, though—being younger, I grew up without any expectation of privacy from strangers, and I don't see anything wrong with that, really. I know that everyone else has just as many trite details floating around about them as I do, so there's no reason to single me out. It's like the sociological warfare of cars getting a steering-wheel-locking device/alarm/what have you, but in reverse: every person that removes their car's security is one more person reducing the probability that my car will be the one to get stolen.
    - lutorm 17y ago
      That's fine until ten years from now someone really wants to make an ass out of you -- not your friends, not random people, but you -- and go on a digging spree. That sort of security by obscurity only works until someone starts looking with a specific thing in mind.
      - derefr 17y ago
        It's not security by obscurity, it's security by honesty. You can't blackmail someone with something everyone already knows about them.
    - adzuci 17y ago
      * Rips the clock out of the vcr. *, That was fun, great analogy, but how do the generational gaps get jumped? Intereestingly enough it's pretty easy for me to rip Buzz out of Gmail, its the constant "he doesn't get it" whispering that bugs people. Everyone tries to advertise to new users, but its hard to do without seeming unnecessary or even evil to so many. I had the same observation of twitter, but they weren't part of millions of users email. I think Google will get over the evil hump this time though, for now it looks like an inevitable backlash to how fast they are growing a user base.
  - madair 17y ago
    Got them tightly under your control, do you?
dbz 17y ago
I understand you do not wish to use social networking sites. We all get that from the article. Instead of turning off buzz you complain about how complicated it is. Who wants to bet me money he didn't spend ten minutes on buzz before deciding it was crap? Why? Why? Why? Why? ... Why would Google be trying to make you feel guilty? That is so ridiculous- I'm not going to comment any further. Jesus. Stop complaining. Buzz was invented for me. Maybe for Google too. Not aimed for people, however, like you Mr. Tech writer/author. I want to rant so much and use ad hominem to its full potential but I won't. I have a feeling I've spent more time writing this post than you did looking at Buzz.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- dbz 17y ago
  If people are going to downvote me, I would appreciate knowing why -other than the fact that I believe the author ignorantly wrote and article, and people don't like to hear what I have to say (sometimes).
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - dbz 17y ago
      Fair enough. I stereotyped old people- based off of lots of experience helping older fellows. I'll delete what I said for it is wrong.
  - philk 17y ago
    Not having actually downvoted you I'd say it's because the tone of your comment comes across as rather angry and personal. Picking apart arguments based on their content seems to get a better reception than attacking their author.
    - dbz 17y ago
maurycy 17y ago
Good point. I start to move my e-mail out of Gmail. Their approach to privacy freaks me out.
philk 17y ago
As with most of these things I think it's pretty hard to say whether it's worthwhile until it's been out in the wild for a while. Many people looked at Twitter and thought it was useless initially ("140 characters? Ha!") and that wasn't an accurate prediction.
- jff 17y ago
  It wasn't? (2 minutes ago from web)
buster 17y ago
First, while still having some little bugs, the gmail integration is done really good. That's probably the best thing after looking at buzz for one day. Second, is this Author pretending to be knowledgable of tech? This blog post is one of the worst informed posts i've seen so far. On a technology he is pretending to know about. I mean the part about Google Wave. He should know, that Wave is not really intended for real use nowadays. There isn't even a client protocol done by the developers! That should tell you about the early state of wave. There also is no federation, i don't see other wave servers connected to google wave popping up. Without a client protocol and several running wave servers, Wave is just tech preview thing, not more. Third, he probably has missed the new century. People can complain over social networks, but he may have missed that social networks are overtaking mail and IM in terms of communication channel at the young users, the internet population of tomorrow. In that way, integrating buzz with gmail is a _perfect_ fit! That some old guy is complaining will be something we laugh at in a few years. Anyway, not one point of constructive/objective critisism in this blog post, just "ohhh, i'm scared, i don't want that new stuff, i want my old mail back!!". Why doesn't he unfollow his pre setup followers and be done with it? It's not like Google forces him to read status updates of his friends. All in all, the post is a shame for a blog post that is supposed to be about new technology. Also, it is worth mentioning, that buzz is probably the most developer friendly and open social network out there http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/buzz/ http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/buzz/ .
- alexro 17y ago
  I think he's complaining from the ordinary consumer (non-geek) point of view. And if such he is perfectly right.
benwr 17y ago
I'm a little peeved by the author's parting shot: "a world where nerd engineers get turned loose in a Montessori preschool, and they have no idea about user interface design and, frankly, they don’t care.  " Everything the author does on the internet was created by these "nerd engineers," most with no expertise in UI design. Petty quibbles aside, though, the author has a point: Google's services recently have appeared to lean toward the Google-serving with the side-effect of helping Google's userbase at large. Of course, they are a for-profit corporation and this is to be expected, but I think everyone was hoping that "don't be evil" really meant "actively pursue the best interests of the internet, even above profit." On the other hand, I disagree that Buzz specifically is Google simply trying to punch out other social networking sites. Currently there are three basic types of personal communication online: IM, Email, and Facebook/Twitter. GMail has already combined the first two, and I think it makes logical sense to add the third. It's certainly useful, just maybe not useful and better.
- drusenko 17y ago
  In regards to the first point, I felt like he was making a distinction between what he's calling "nerd engineers" (perhaps poorly chosen) -- with no design sense or care for UI -- and other engineers, who carefully think out their interfaces.
- adzuci 17y ago
  Good point on the evil, although I'd have to say I'm a little more than peeved overall with the attacks, if anything the article put me more on Google's side. Yes, Google absorbs startups and imitates any product, but it's competitive edge is the crowd of engineers who say, "Hey, I could do that better". All its expansions are evolutionary, and they take into consideration all the criticism out there better than most others could. Regardless, if you don't want to Buzz then opt-out, but the competition between Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest will come down too which are most convenient and affective, followers will take it from there. Right now though, Buzz can easily replace Twitter for me, but theres a way to go before Facebook starts trembling, and I don't think Orcut is joining the show any time soon.
akkartik 17y ago
"Then came Twitter, which is mostly pointless, since I really don’t care what anyone else is doing at any particular moment and have no desire to tell others what I’m doing either, but again I joined, mostly because if I didn’t get on Twitter I’d look like someone who doesn’t “get it,” as they say in the Valley, and in my line of work that’s a bad reputation to have." If that's indeed how people are judging him, this article is not going to help his 'reputation'. I absolutely understand somebody not using a service (I don't use facebook). But that whole paragraph gives me very little confidence that this is an opinion I should listen to. It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT".
- sterling 17y ago
  "It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT"." What does that mean? Does your 50-year-old uncle exist? I am 48 and I am "in IT" and I work mostly with men between the ages of 21 and 27. Despite their youth, their very long/very short hair, and their t-shirts, some of them are genuine fuddy-duddies (old-fashioned, conservative, set in their thinking, however you want to call it). The chief focus of their conservatism is an almost religious adherence to doctrine, to how things have been so far in their very short lifetimes. Here's what someone my age thinks: Google has introduced a "service" that politely adds to the annoyance of our lives. If google cared about what users wanted, they would be improving their core business, search, which is becoming increasingly polluted by spam.
  - arethuza 17y ago
    I think there may be a spot, say in the mid 20s, where you become emotionally committed to a particular technology stack and everything else is compared against that reference. So there is quite often quite a lot of stiction there to move to a new stack. When I was in my mid 20s (nearly 20 years ago) I was developing in Common Lisp and PostScript. And while I am still very fond of those technologies, once I left an academic environment I didn't really have much option but to go for a sequence of, comparatively mundane, platforms.
  - Groxx 17y ago
    (Empirically) statistically, though, the 50+ age group is significantly less up-to-date with internet fads than the below-50 group. Yes, there are exceptions, but a quick glance will inform anyone of the same comparison. That said, early-20s here, and I'm turning off Buzz. I'm also out of FB. Which makes me one of the oddballs for my age group.
aswanson 17y ago
So I just checked into buzz and found a work email buzz from someone who's posted nothing and another person who I have no reason to follow or even care about. So until they get like, I dunno, more than 150 passionate users can we let this Orkut 2.0 clone rest easy?
apike 17y ago
The oddest thing about Buzz was that it's automatically following everybody I've ever conversed with using GMail, whether or not I know them. They successfully avoided the "nobody's here" problem that Wave had, but by opting in everybody who uses GMail, it created the opposite problem.
- jedc 17y ago
  Really? I was only automatically following my real friends. I keep my full address book in Google Contacts (1000+ ppl, including long-gone friends/workmates/classmates). Perhaps because I use Gmail as my main personal account it was able to figure out who was who.
  - btipling 17y ago
    I used gmail for maybe a year many years ago, Google Buzz ended up following people I've never talked to, including someone who spammed me once.
    - adzuci 17y ago
      Heh, interesting, I'd say it definitely was made to jump start off of Gmail users, works well for everyone I know, but looks like there are exceptions.
  - brown9-2 17y ago
    Did you use Reader and share items in there? If so it seems as if Buzz just re-uses those settings.
  - apike 17y ago
    Interesting. They might be using a heuristic, or they might be auto-following people who follow me from their address books.
- DougBTX 17y ago
  Not for me, my buzz is empty, and I've conversed with others using gmail before. My gmail address book, however, is probably empty, since I don't use that.
floodfx 17y ago
classic dissenter view of a new product (or products in this case). newsweek writer pissing on facebook, twitter and buzz in one article. i guess this is indicative of why i haven't read a newsweek article since never and probably won't unless i am baited into it again.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Aegean 17y ago
good technology but the first thing I looked for was how to make people unfollow me. It's simply stupid how they forget privacy and only look at the _buzz_ it brings. I will turn it off for now.
- sp332 17y ago
  Go to your contacts and make a new group. Add the people you want to let follow you. Change your privacy settings so that only people in that group can see your "buzz." Not really intuitive, but I think that's the "official" way to do it.
antimora 17y ago
"That is the biggest problem with Buzz—it was invented not for us but for Google. " is right on the spot
- yellowbkpk 17y ago
  I get the feeling that all of Google's products were invented for Google to help streamline the way it does things. Gmail, Wave, GChat, Reader ... all of these things have the feel of "we didn't like what was existing in the ecosystem, so we made our own the way we like it." ... and that's a good thing.
  - gaius 17y ago
    I doubt that Google ever had the problem "how do we best show ads to internal email users". GMail was marketware from the start. That's neither good nor bad in and of itself, but let's be honest about why Google does anything.
    - stevejohnson 17y ago
      Gmail was not marketware from the start. It was an internal tool to which ads were added later.
      - gaius 17y ago
        So the legend says.
adrianwaj 17y ago
Product Manager Todd Jackson who presented Buzz seemed really smart and enthusiastic, and that's a really good start for Buzz. There is a need for this type of stream-based social networking. I think the biggest factors in Buzz's success will be: - can Google monetize it: they should do the things that Twitter won't in this respect. - will the API be easy enough and presented simply enough for novices to use (eg like Twitter) - but also be complex enough for advanced usage: eg, easy location based stuff - can they fully break it out of the Gmail Silo and make it a standalone service. Why not create a new product with independent name, Microsoft Live became Bing. Google Buzz becomes _____ - can they integrate it with Google Apps email interfaces rather than just GMail most importantly - will they keep engineers and many resources on it, taking in feedback and iterating
- oscardelben 17y ago
  > - can Google monetize it: they should do the things that Twitter won't in this respect. What they really want is data, so they are already monetizing it
motters 17y ago
"Google has copied stuff that people do on Facebook and Twitter and added them to Gmail" That's a pretty concise summary.
nlanier 17y ago
Perhaps I am in the large minority but so far I have found Buzz to be engaging and quite useful. I wanted to try out a local restaurant and put the question to Buzz and received eight insightful responses in less than an hour. I enjoy it and I think it has plenty of "stickiness" as a lot of my non-technophobe friends are already using it quite heavily.
- PieSquared 17y ago
  I actually think you aren't a minority. Many of my tech/web-less-literate friends are already using Buzz and liking it; it's mostly the techies and web developers and programmers that are saying "Oh, it'll fail like Wave" and "It's stupider than twitter and facebook, it'll die instantly". I also like it, and am noting that others do too.
  - drewr 17y ago
    I agree. I'm finding it more useful than I thought I would. That it's integrated with gmail is a big part of it. Keyboard shortcuts work, and conversations I'm a part of show up in my inbox. I know Wave is about much more, but this may be all I wanted from it.
- bradtgmurray 17y ago
  You could do this same thing on Twitter. Is the already large install base the only thing Google Buzz has going for it?
  - natrius 17y ago
    The first time I opened Buzz, I saw random thoughts from people in my neighborhood. If you're asking for restaurant suggestions, that's going to be far more helpful than Twitter, where you need to have people following you or searching for something in your tweet for people to ever see it.
  - mattmcknight 17y ago
    I think what GMail did for conversations in email,GBuzz does for conversations in Twitter. The @reply mechanism and the retweet convention never really worked well for me in Twitter, although that may be because I was not using the necessary third party tooling to visualize it. Also, you can add more than 140 characters, real links, pictures, etc. You lose some of the public version of SMS feel that Twitter has, but those constraints were becoming more of an annoyance to me.
kerringtonx 17y ago
Buzz should be Google's own starting point for leading into Wave. I think they should turn Wave into the all encompassing aggregator of everything. Then, throw that whole package into Chrome, as opposed to Wave standalone, make it clean/fast, and it would be pretty fun to use. I'd be in Chrome all day without having to load any other social site
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
>Then came Twitter, which is mostly pointless, since I really don’t care what anyone else is doing at any particular moment and have no desire to tell others what I’m doing either Does anyone still use Twitter that way?
- btipling 17y ago
  I use Twitter to read news, updates from organizations and look at space pictures from astronauts. I kind of have replaced Google Reader with Twitter.
  - levesque 17y ago
    That's interesting. I do use google reader but not twitter. What does Twitter bring you that google reader cannot?
bhellman1 17y ago
Can you turn Buzz off?
alexro 17y ago
"Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be—the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business." - he nailed it
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  If the imitation is lame, then that's too bad. But if it becomes better over time and is more open, then that'll be a good thing. It's always surprising how people can on one hand deplore how closed Facebook is, and how it doesn't have competition and is just becoming a big monopolistic walled-garden, and then when more open competition arrives, they whine that there are too many social networks and that someone else than Google should've done it (oh yeah, who else has the installed user base to compete with Facebook and Twitter?).
  - alexro 17y ago
    That definitely is a difficult position for Google to be in, hence they need not to rush with such important decisions as privacy inside the email application.
GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
I think the idea is to integrate buzz, facebook, twitter all into one inbox in your gmail account so you can respond in the same format you got the message in. So it don't matter if your friend is on fb or twitter or whatever you just go to 1 inbox.
pilif 17y ago
here in Zürich, Switzerland, the map is exploding with buzzes of various people all over the place. Sometimes there's even conversation happening between complete strangers, which, trust me on that, is totally uncommon here in Switzerland :-) In so far, buzz seems to have had a huge impact in the society I live in, so I'm happy. The very aggressive binding to the location IMHO really emphasizes location dependent communication over general communication - something I have used Twitter for so far and probably will still be using in the future. But for little, location dependent things like "don't visit restaurant x right now - it's full" or "it looks like the tram is late", buzz is incredibly useful and being heavily used for around here. That it also spawns conversation between strangers is a nice additional benefit.
caryme 17y ago
I saw a pretty telling comment on a friend's buzz imported from twitter: "I'm glad that I can get a glimpse of the twitter life, and not actually have to figure out another social networking thing. Yay!" This was striking to me. It seems like this Twitter outsider does not view Buzz - something in her gmail - as "another social networking thing." Maybe this looks different to those of us on the outside.
perlpimp 17y ago
It is easier to apologize then to get permission first, or so many thought leaders say. So I commend google on making a bold move like that. They can fix it up later on with some more privacy controls, updates to interface. Facebook is doing it twice a year to their their core product.
jasonkester 17y ago
Can somebody explain what Buzz actually does? As far as I can tell, it is filling a tab on my inbox with random messages from people I've never heard of (though presumably are in my email address book or something), saying things like "I am testing Buzz." How is this supposed to improve my life?
- EricBurnett 17y ago
  Presumably you accepted the default suggested people to follow. Go to the buzz tab, unfollow anyone you don't immediately recognize, and it becomes like facebook except integrated into gmail and only for people you actually communicate with. Improve your life? I don't think anyone can answer that yet - it depends how people end up using it. And if you decide you don't like it, opt out.
  - calcnerd256 17y ago
    Opting out is at the bottom of the page, by the way. It's right next to opting out of chat.
    - colonelxc 17y ago
      It does not opt you out, it only hides buzz from your gmail Disabling Buzz: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html
  - jasonkester 17y ago
    Yeah, but there's the rub. I unfollowed everybody it would allow me to, but there's still a couple people there without "unfollow" in the dropdown list of options. They're marked "Twitter - Public" instead of "Buzz - Public", which is probably the reason they're un-unfollowable. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and most innane of the bunch.
richardw 17y ago
I think the author should stop signing up for new web services. This is the path to happiness, for him.
pkulak 17y ago
I'm just sad that they don't have it for apps yet. I'd like to start using it, but then if it does become available for the email address that I actually use (and that people know about) I don't want to have to start all over.
polynomial 17y ago
I completely disagree. Sure it's easy to take pot shots at companies like Google as soon as they get a little too big/powerful for their britches however to really understand Google's importance, at least one crucial aspect, look at what's going on in China, and now Iran, and somewhat unbelievably now Australia (who apparently are trying to emulate China.) Systems of real-time communication are critical infrastructure and the ongoing debate over freedom and privacy serves the lesson that there are no easy answers. We do know however that there is an especially interesting, if complex, relationship between technological systems and political freedom and that this is an issue of growing importance. In short, while Buzz may compete with Twitter (or Facebook) and while a certain number will still use it to tell you what they had for lunch or forward the 2010 equivalent of an email chain letter meme, the reality is that it is just another piece of the puzzle in the emerging web of global communications infrastructure, and has much more far-reaching implications.

93 points by razorburn 17y ago

Indeed, after taking a quick look at Buzz, I scrolled down to the bottom of gmail and clicked "turn off buzz". Who needs more of this stuff in their life?

gcampbell 17y ago
I'm pretty annoyed that my kids' email accounts suddenly turned into a social networking site - there's a reason I don't let them have Facebook accounts.
- dbz 17y ago
  This is the first valid complaint I have read. Although I don't agree with your views, I do understand them, and I appreciate the fact that you didn't talk about problems which can be easily fixed by an off button.
  - gcampbell 17y ago
    Which of my views do you disagree with? Prior to yesterday, GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell. Now it's far too easy for that child to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire Internet.
    - dbz 17y ago
      I believe that instead of stopping one's kids from giving out personal information (unless they have a disorder- then it may be necessary), one should teach his or her children what is appropriate: to speak and to write => in public and in private- to family - to friends - to acquaintances - to strangers. All of that should be taught. Show the child why things are bad rather than simply stopping them. If your child doesn't listen, then more extreme measures of censorship should come into play.
      - blogimus 17y ago
        Keywords: "taught" "show" "listen" "learn" Let's turn this around a little bit: I believe that instead of automotive safety belts, we should all just teach people to drive slower and more cautiously. That we we are not encumbered by restrictive seat belts. Reasonable? Takeaway: Take everything that you just said and then add parental controls on top of it because children really do need boundaries while they learn to think for themselves and hopefully make good decisions. Yes. I am a parent.
        dbz 17y ago
        =] Very interesting point; however, I must completely disagree. In a car you are entrusting your life to other drivers, but in sharing information about yourself, you are entrusting yourself. I'm trying to say "You have no control over others, but you have control over yourself" which is why I view your point as incorrect- yet interesting.
        oscardelben 17y ago
        What you said is true, but children are not responsible fot themselves until they reach a certain age, the parent is responsible for them.
        SlyShy 17y ago
        That kind of thinking is a great way to bring up children who remain irresponsible for their own behavior. Growing up I was responsible for everything I did, and now I'm quite tired of college classmates who still haven't learned to take accountability for basic things.
        oscardelben 17y ago
        Yes but at 12 you may not be able to reason with your head, and if you do something you are not supposed to do, your parents will pay for it, so they're still responsible for you. It's the law (at least where I live).
    - buster 17y ago
      While true, that there is a risk to expose personal information to the internet you probably should start to educate your kids in internet usage and not deny them. You sentence "GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell" shows that you are still living in the 20th century. "As far as i can tell" means "i didn't ask them but i don't use facebook and email works, so it works for them too". Did you really ask your kids if their friends communicate over social networks? You probably did miss it (too busy complaining and fearing?) but social networks are overtaking mail. You don't expect your kids to write their friends mail when everyone else is writing messages in facebook, do you? You will see, that your kids will get access to facebook/whatever anyway, if not only out of despite. One of many sources: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popular-than-email/ http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popula... I beg you: Start educating your kids soon, if you have concerns, but don't forbid them!
      - gcampbell 17y ago
        I see nothing wrong with allowing my kids to use social networking sites once I feel confident they're mature enough to accept the responsibility for managing their own privacy (and, in fact, my older child does already, although only on sites that allow pseudonyms for now). My observation is simply that use of email requires an entirely different understanding of privacy concerns than use of Twitter or Facebook, and that the default settings Google Buzz sets up are neither especially obvious (I had to hunt around for a while to figure out what was actually displayed to the public via Google Profile) nor what I would recommend for a minor. Again: I have no problem with educating my children about the proper use of social networking sites. I simply don't appreciate being forced to do so by a service which they've been able to use without these sorts of concerns since they were old enough to read.
    - dtf 17y ago
      It's easy to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire internet using email. Claire Swire, Peter Chung, Trevor Luxton and countless others can vouch for this. The point-to-point nature of mail communication (and text messaging for that matter) gives an unfortunate illusion of privacy, yet publication and mass replication are only a couple of clicks away. Posting on openly public sites such as Twitter and Facebook actually forces a lot more careful consideration up front. The sober reality is that you and your children should be treating the private emails you send in the same manner.
      - timthorn 17y ago
        Unfortunately, posting on openly public sites doesn't force more careful consideration - only the poster can do that. I've heard too many people opine that they don't care who sees their posts yet share really private information.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      What happens when they get old enough to make such a decision for themselves and find themselves unprepared? Education > protection. (and this is from someone who was given extremely limited web access till the age of about 16 - and then promptly did some very silly things.... so take it from experience :))
- derefr 17y ago
  I understand the complaint, but in this day and age, that's like being annoyed that your microwave and VCR have clocks. Everything is a social networking site now. I had to think for a minute in order to not include some form of profiles and user-to-user messaging in the last app I wrote. I think it's just a generation gap, though—being younger, I grew up without any expectation of privacy from strangers, and I don't see anything wrong with that, really. I know that everyone else has just as many trite details floating around about them as I do, so there's no reason to single me out. It's like the sociological warfare of cars getting a steering-wheel-locking device/alarm/what have you, but in reverse: every person that removes their car's security is one more person reducing the probability that my car will be the one to get stolen.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    That's fine until ten years from now someone really wants to make an ass out of you -- not your friends, not random people, but you -- and go on a digging spree. That sort of security by obscurity only works until someone starts looking with a specific thing in mind.
    - derefr 17y ago
      It's not security by obscurity, it's security by honesty. You can't blackmail someone with something everyone already knows about them.
  - adzuci 17y ago
    * Rips the clock out of the vcr. *, That was fun, great analogy, but how do the generational gaps get jumped? Intereestingly enough it's pretty easy for me to rip Buzz out of Gmail, its the constant "he doesn't get it" whispering that bugs people. Everyone tries to advertise to new users, but its hard to do without seeming unnecessary or even evil to so many. I had the same observation of twitter, but they weren't part of millions of users email. I think Google will get over the evil hump this time though, for now it looks like an inevitable backlash to how fast they are growing a user base.
- madair 17y ago
  Got them tightly under your control, do you?

dbz 17y ago

I understand you do not wish to use social networking sites. We all get that from the article. Instead of turning off buzz you complain about how complicated it is. Who wants to bet me money he didn't spend ten minutes on buzz before deciding it was crap? Why? Why? Why? Why? ... Why would Google be trying to make you feel guilty? That is so ridiculous- I'm not going to comment any further. Jesus. Stop complaining. Buzz was invented for me. Maybe for Google too. Not aimed for people, however, like you Mr. Tech writer/author. I want to rant so much and use ad hominem to its full potential but I won't. I have a feeling I've spent more time writing this post than you did looking at Buzz.

deleted 17y ago
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dbz 17y ago
If people are going to downvote me, I would appreciate knowing why -other than the fact that I believe the author ignorantly wrote and article, and people don't like to hear what I have to say (sometimes).
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - dbz 17y ago
    Fair enough. I stereotyped old people- based off of lots of experience helping older fellows. I'll delete what I said for it is wrong.
- philk 17y ago
  Not having actually downvoted you I'd say it's because the tone of your comment comes across as rather angry and personal. Picking apart arguments based on their content seems to get a better reception than attacking their author.
  - dbz 17y ago

maurycy 17y ago

Good point. I start to move my e-mail out of Gmail. Their approach to privacy freaks me out.

philk 17y ago

As with most of these things I think it's pretty hard to say whether it's worthwhile until it's been out in the wild for a while. Many people looked at Twitter and thought it was useless initially ("140 characters? Ha!") and that wasn't an accurate prediction.

jff 17y ago
It wasn't? (2 minutes ago from web)

buster 17y ago

First, while still having some little bugs, the gmail integration is done really good. That's probably the best thing after looking at buzz for one day. Second, is this Author pretending to be knowledgable of tech? This blog post is one of the worst informed posts i've seen so far. On a technology he is pretending to know about. I mean the part about Google Wave. He should know, that Wave is not really intended for real use nowadays. There isn't even a client protocol done by the developers! That should tell you about the early state of wave. There also is no federation, i don't see other wave servers connected to google wave popping up. Without a client protocol and several running wave servers, Wave is just tech preview thing, not more. Third, he probably has missed the new century. People can complain over social networks, but he may have missed that social networks are overtaking mail and IM in terms of communication channel at the young users, the internet population of tomorrow. In that way, integrating buzz with gmail is a _perfect_ fit! That some old guy is complaining will be something we laugh at in a few years. Anyway, not one point of constructive/objective critisism in this blog post, just "ohhh, i'm scared, i don't want that new stuff, i want my old mail back!!". Why doesn't he unfollow his pre setup followers and be done with it? It's not like Google forces him to read status updates of his friends. All in all, the post is a shame for a blog post that is supposed to be about new technology. Also, it is worth mentioning, that buzz is probably the most developer friendly and open social network out there http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/buzz/ http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/buzz/ .

alexro 17y ago
I think he's complaining from the ordinary consumer (non-geek) point of view. And if such he is perfectly right.

benwr 17y ago

I'm a little peeved by the author's parting shot: "a world where nerd engineers get turned loose in a Montessori preschool, and they have no idea about user interface design and, frankly, they don’t care.  " Everything the author does on the internet was created by these "nerd engineers," most with no expertise in UI design. Petty quibbles aside, though, the author has a point: Google's services recently have appeared to lean toward the Google-serving with the side-effect of helping Google's userbase at large. Of course, they are a for-profit corporation and this is to be expected, but I think everyone was hoping that "don't be evil" really meant "actively pursue the best interests of the internet, even above profit." On the other hand, I disagree that Buzz specifically is Google simply trying to punch out other social networking sites. Currently there are three basic types of personal communication online: IM, Email, and Facebook/Twitter. GMail has already combined the first two, and I think it makes logical sense to add the third. It's certainly useful, just maybe not useful and better.

drusenko 17y ago
In regards to the first point, I felt like he was making a distinction between what he's calling "nerd engineers" (perhaps poorly chosen) -- with no design sense or care for UI -- and other engineers, who carefully think out their interfaces.
adzuci 17y ago
Good point on the evil, although I'd have to say I'm a little more than peeved overall with the attacks, if anything the article put me more on Google's side. Yes, Google absorbs startups and imitates any product, but it's competitive edge is the crowd of engineers who say, "Hey, I could do that better". All its expansions are evolutionary, and they take into consideration all the criticism out there better than most others could. Regardless, if you don't want to Buzz then opt-out, but the competition between Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest will come down too which are most convenient and affective, followers will take it from there. Right now though, Buzz can easily replace Twitter for me, but theres a way to go before Facebook starts trembling, and I don't think Orcut is joining the show any time soon.

akkartik 17y ago

"Then came Twitter, which is mostly pointless, since I really don’t care what anyone else is doing at any particular moment and have no desire to tell others what I’m doing either, but again I joined, mostly because if I didn’t get on Twitter I’d look like someone who doesn’t “get it,” as they say in the Valley, and in my line of work that’s a bad reputation to have." If that's indeed how people are judging him, this article is not going to help his 'reputation'. I absolutely understand somebody not using a service (I don't use facebook). But that whole paragraph gives me very little confidence that this is an opinion I should listen to. It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT".

sterling 17y ago
"It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT"." What does that mean? Does your 50-year-old uncle exist? I am 48 and I am "in IT" and I work mostly with men between the ages of 21 and 27. Despite their youth, their very long/very short hair, and their t-shirts, some of them are genuine fuddy-duddies (old-fashioned, conservative, set in their thinking, however you want to call it). The chief focus of their conservatism is an almost religious adherence to doctrine, to how things have been so far in their very short lifetimes. Here's what someone my age thinks: Google has introduced a "service" that politely adds to the annoyance of our lives. If google cared about what users wanted, they would be improving their core business, search, which is becoming increasingly polluted by spam.
- arethuza 17y ago
  I think there may be a spot, say in the mid 20s, where you become emotionally committed to a particular technology stack and everything else is compared against that reference. So there is quite often quite a lot of stiction there to move to a new stack. When I was in my mid 20s (nearly 20 years ago) I was developing in Common Lisp and PostScript. And while I am still very fond of those technologies, once I left an academic environment I didn't really have much option but to go for a sequence of, comparatively mundane, platforms.
- Groxx 17y ago
  (Empirically) statistically, though, the 50+ age group is significantly less up-to-date with internet fads than the below-50 group. Yes, there are exceptions, but a quick glance will inform anyone of the same comparison. That said, early-20s here, and I'm turning off Buzz. I'm also out of FB. Which makes me one of the oddballs for my age group.

aswanson 17y ago

So I just checked into buzz and found a work email buzz from someone who's posted nothing and another person who I have no reason to follow or even care about. So until they get like, I dunno, more than 150 passionate users can we let this Orkut 2.0 clone rest easy?

apike 17y ago

The oddest thing about Buzz was that it's automatically following everybody I've ever conversed with using GMail, whether or not I know them. They successfully avoided the "nobody's here" problem that Wave had, but by opting in everybody who uses GMail, it created the opposite problem.

jedc 17y ago
Really? I was only automatically following my real friends. I keep my full address book in Google Contacts (1000+ ppl, including long-gone friends/workmates/classmates). Perhaps because I use Gmail as my main personal account it was able to figure out who was who.
- btipling 17y ago
  I used gmail for maybe a year many years ago, Google Buzz ended up following people I've never talked to, including someone who spammed me once.
  - adzuci 17y ago
    Heh, interesting, I'd say it definitely was made to jump start off of Gmail users, works well for everyone I know, but looks like there are exceptions.
- brown9-2 17y ago
  Did you use Reader and share items in there? If so it seems as if Buzz just re-uses those settings.
- apike 17y ago
  Interesting. They might be using a heuristic, or they might be auto-following people who follow me from their address books.
DougBTX 17y ago
Not for me, my buzz is empty, and I've conversed with others using gmail before. My gmail address book, however, is probably empty, since I don't use that.

floodfx 17y ago

classic dissenter view of a new product (or products in this case). newsweek writer pissing on facebook, twitter and buzz in one article. i guess this is indicative of why i haven't read a newsweek article since never and probably won't unless i am baited into it again.

deleted 17y ago

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Aegean 17y ago

good technology but the first thing I looked for was how to make people unfollow me. It's simply stupid how they forget privacy and only look at the _buzz_ it brings. I will turn it off for now.

sp332 17y ago
Go to your contacts and make a new group. Add the people you want to let follow you. Change your privacy settings so that only people in that group can see your "buzz." Not really intuitive, but I think that's the "official" way to do it.

antimora 17y ago

"That is the biggest problem with Buzz—it was invented not for us but for Google. " is right on the spot

yellowbkpk 17y ago
I get the feeling that all of Google's products were invented for Google to help streamline the way it does things. Gmail, Wave, GChat, Reader ... all of these things have the feel of "we didn't like what was existing in the ecosystem, so we made our own the way we like it." ... and that's a good thing.
- gaius 17y ago
  I doubt that Google ever had the problem "how do we best show ads to internal email users". GMail was marketware from the start. That's neither good nor bad in and of itself, but let's be honest about why Google does anything.
  - stevejohnson 17y ago
    Gmail was not marketware from the start. It was an internal tool to which ads were added later.
    - gaius 17y ago
      So the legend says.

adrianwaj 17y ago

Product Manager Todd Jackson who presented Buzz seemed really smart and enthusiastic, and that's a really good start for Buzz. There is a need for this type of stream-based social networking. I think the biggest factors in Buzz's success will be: - can Google monetize it: they should do the things that Twitter won't in this respect. - will the API be easy enough and presented simply enough for novices to use (eg like Twitter) - but also be complex enough for advanced usage: eg, easy location based stuff - can they fully break it out of the Gmail Silo and make it a standalone service. Why not create a new product with independent name, Microsoft Live became Bing. Google Buzz becomes _____ - can they integrate it with Google Apps email interfaces rather than just GMail most importantly - will they keep engineers and many resources on it, taking in feedback and iterating

oscardelben 17y ago
> - can Google monetize it: they should do the things that Twitter won't in this respect. What they really want is data, so they are already monetizing it

motters 17y ago

"Google has copied stuff that people do on Facebook and Twitter and added them to Gmail" That's a pretty concise summary.

nlanier 17y ago

Perhaps I am in the large minority but so far I have found Buzz to be engaging and quite useful. I wanted to try out a local restaurant and put the question to Buzz and received eight insightful responses in less than an hour. I enjoy it and I think it has plenty of "stickiness" as a lot of my non-technophobe friends are already using it quite heavily.

PieSquared 17y ago
I actually think you aren't a minority. Many of my tech/web-less-literate friends are already using Buzz and liking it; it's mostly the techies and web developers and programmers that are saying "Oh, it'll fail like Wave" and "It's stupider than twitter and facebook, it'll die instantly". I also like it, and am noting that others do too.
- drewr 17y ago
  I agree. I'm finding it more useful than I thought I would. That it's integrated with gmail is a big part of it. Keyboard shortcuts work, and conversations I'm a part of show up in my inbox. I know Wave is about much more, but this may be all I wanted from it.
bradtgmurray 17y ago
You could do this same thing on Twitter. Is the already large install base the only thing Google Buzz has going for it?
- natrius 17y ago
  The first time I opened Buzz, I saw random thoughts from people in my neighborhood. If you're asking for restaurant suggestions, that's going to be far more helpful than Twitter, where you need to have people following you or searching for something in your tweet for people to ever see it.
- mattmcknight 17y ago
  I think what GMail did for conversations in email,GBuzz does for conversations in Twitter. The @reply mechanism and the retweet convention never really worked well for me in Twitter, although that may be because I was not using the necessary third party tooling to visualize it. Also, you can add more than 140 characters, real links, pictures, etc. You lose some of the public version of SMS feel that Twitter has, but those constraints were becoming more of an annoyance to me.

kerringtonx 17y ago

Buzz should be Google's own starting point for leading into Wave. I think they should turn Wave into the all encompassing aggregator of everything. Then, throw that whole package into Chrome, as opposed to Wave standalone, make it clean/fast, and it would be pretty fun to use. I'd be in Chrome all day without having to load any other social site

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

>Then came Twitter, which is mostly pointless, since I really don’t care what anyone else is doing at any particular moment and have no desire to tell others what I’m doing either Does anyone still use Twitter that way?

btipling 17y ago
I use Twitter to read news, updates from organizations and look at space pictures from astronauts. I kind of have replaced Google Reader with Twitter.
- levesque 17y ago
  That's interesting. I do use google reader but not twitter. What does Twitter bring you that google reader cannot?

bhellman1 17y ago

Can you turn Buzz off?

alexro 17y ago

"Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be—the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business." - he nailed it

MikeCapone 17y ago
If the imitation is lame, then that's too bad. But if it becomes better over time and is more open, then that'll be a good thing. It's always surprising how people can on one hand deplore how closed Facebook is, and how it doesn't have competition and is just becoming a big monopolistic walled-garden, and then when more open competition arrives, they whine that there are too many social networks and that someone else than Google should've done it (oh yeah, who else has the installed user base to compete with Facebook and Twitter?).
- alexro 17y ago
  That definitely is a difficult position for Google to be in, hence they need not to rush with such important decisions as privacy inside the email application.

GrandMasterBirt 17y ago

I think the idea is to integrate buzz, facebook, twitter all into one inbox in your gmail account so you can respond in the same format you got the message in. So it don't matter if your friend is on fb or twitter or whatever you just go to 1 inbox.

pilif 17y ago

here in Zürich, Switzerland, the map is exploding with buzzes of various people all over the place. Sometimes there's even conversation happening between complete strangers, which, trust me on that, is totally uncommon here in Switzerland :-) In so far, buzz seems to have had a huge impact in the society I live in, so I'm happy. The very aggressive binding to the location IMHO really emphasizes location dependent communication over general communication - something I have used Twitter for so far and probably will still be using in the future. But for little, location dependent things like "don't visit restaurant x right now - it's full" or "it looks like the tram is late", buzz is incredibly useful and being heavily used for around here. That it also spawns conversation between strangers is a nice additional benefit.

caryme 17y ago

I saw a pretty telling comment on a friend's buzz imported from twitter: "I'm glad that I can get a glimpse of the twitter life, and not actually have to figure out another social networking thing. Yay!" This was striking to me. It seems like this Twitter outsider does not view Buzz - something in her gmail - as "another social networking thing." Maybe this looks different to those of us on the outside.

perlpimp 17y ago

It is easier to apologize then to get permission first, or so many thought leaders say. So I commend google on making a bold move like that. They can fix it up later on with some more privacy controls, updates to interface. Facebook is doing it twice a year to their their core product.

jasonkester 17y ago

Can somebody explain what Buzz actually does? As far as I can tell, it is filling a tab on my inbox with random messages from people I've never heard of (though presumably are in my email address book or something), saying things like "I am testing Buzz." How is this supposed to improve my life?

EricBurnett 17y ago
Presumably you accepted the default suggested people to follow. Go to the buzz tab, unfollow anyone you don't immediately recognize, and it becomes like facebook except integrated into gmail and only for people you actually communicate with. Improve your life? I don't think anyone can answer that yet - it depends how people end up using it. And if you decide you don't like it, opt out.
- calcnerd256 17y ago
  Opting out is at the bottom of the page, by the way. It's right next to opting out of chat.
  - colonelxc 17y ago
    It does not opt you out, it only hides buzz from your gmail Disabling Buzz: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html
- jasonkester 17y ago
  Yeah, but there's the rub. I unfollowed everybody it would allow me to, but there's still a couple people there without "unfollow" in the dropdown list of options. They're marked "Twitter - Public" instead of "Buzz - Public", which is probably the reason they're un-unfollowable. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and most innane of the bunch.

richardw 17y ago

I think the author should stop signing up for new web services. This is the path to happiness, for him.

pkulak 17y ago

I'm just sad that they don't have it for apps yet. I'd like to start using it, but then if it does become available for the email address that I actually use (and that people know about) I don't want to have to start all over.

polynomial 17y ago

I completely disagree. Sure it's easy to take pot shots at companies like Google as soon as they get a little too big/powerful for their britches however to really understand Google's importance, at least one crucial aspect, look at what's going on in China, and now Iran, and somewhat unbelievably now Australia (who apparently are trying to emulate China.) Systems of real-time communication are critical infrastructure and the ongoing debate over freedom and privacy serves the lesson that there are no easy answers. We do know however that there is an especially interesting, if complex, relationship between technological systems and political freedom and that this is an issue of growing importance. In short, while Buzz may compete with Twitter (or Facebook) and while a certain number will still use it to tell you what they had for lunch or forward the 2010 equivalent of an email chain letter meme, the reality is that it is just another piece of the puzzle in the emerging web of global communications infrastructure, and has much more far-reaching implications.