13 ms·

Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If you forwarded this post back in time to the Buzz engineers, they would try to fix it before laun

Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If you forwarded this post back in time to the Buzz engineers, they would try to fix it before launch -- not laugh maniacally at the thought of an innocent woman fearing for her safety.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
The engineers are human. I'm sure they're as horrified as you suggest. Companies are not human, certainly not by default. The vector sum of the effort of many humans is inhuman by default. [1] (Phrases like "mob mentality", "team spirit", and "groupthink" didn't get invented for nothing.) It takes hard work to give a company a human face -- hard work by management, by PR, by customer support, by HR. Some companies are much better at such work than others. --- [1] This is, of course, a perennial topic here on HN: It's easier to run a human company when the company has fewer people. That's one of a startup's advantages. Of course, a company that is too small runs the risk of being too human: Humans, for example, are prone to emotional roller-coastering, can become fixated on the trees instead of seeing the forest, and need at least some sleep every day. A team's inherent "inhumanity" can help smooth out misfeatures like this.
- qjz 17y ago
  It appears they may have foreseen the outcome and acted deliberately, if this thread at http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google-cared-more-about-design-then-I-might http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google... is any indication. In particular, see Brett Lider's response that includes this excerpt: 'Similar to Facebook being willing to "piss its users off" when it feels the need to make a big change in its service for the long-term good, I see Buzz in Gmail as a relative big change that requires more than one day to adjust to. We've all been on the side of changes in services that we didn't like and either got used to or actually loved in the long run. We think Buzz is one of them. A lot of us here have also been designers on a service that we knew needed to change but was afraid to because of internal momentum or fear of short-term user reactions.' edit: I think the quote stands on its own. They may be horrified, but the action was rooted in a kind of arrogance we often ascribe to inhuman activity, where the impact on other humans wasn't considered thoughtfully or was deliberately ignored.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Yeah, Thinking about this, it seems like Google and Yahoo have been really envying what is effectively Facebook's captive audience. With Facebook, you sign up for "social networking" is essentially an undefined product whose provider has undefined obligations to you. Email involves some explicitly or implicitly understood bounds and so doesn't let the provider sell it users to the same degree - well, unless the email provide just flagrantly violates their implicit obligations - and so the temptation is greater and greater.
tom_rath 17y ago
Time travel would be spiffy, but how easy is it to contact the Buzz engineers now? If you've ever dealt with Google "technical support" (even if you're a customer who shovels them buckets of cash each week) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to reach an actual human being who can help you. Convoluted as it is, getting a blog post ranked top in Hacker News seems the easiest (only?) way to get a genuine Google issue addressed. I hope they address this one AND create an actual means of contacting the people who are supposed to be running the place.
- jamesjyu 17y ago
  Actually, a friend and I were having a big discussion about Buzz, using Buzz. And, to my surprise, a few Buzz devs jumped into the conversation: http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google-cared-more-about-design-then-I-might http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google...
  - jacabado 17y ago
    And then all your privacy concerns quickly disappeared!
    - enomar 17y ago
      It's a public thread. You'd rather the dev's ignore what people say about their product on an open discussion?
      - dasil003 17y ago
        I daresay the point of the comment is its comedic timing (which is brilliant) rather than its veracity (which is dubious)
  - AdamN 17y ago
    That's nice that they care more about UI than privacy.
- 17y ago
petewarden 17y ago
No, they wouldn't. I'm saying this as somebody who built a product around identifying your 'inner circle' from your email patterns[1]. The part I spent the most time on was figuring out how to protect people's privacy, and these scenarios were painfully obvious even to me. Plenty of people at Google have to have thought this through, but decided the benefits to adoption of the current process outweigh the privacy problems that will happen to some people. That's pretty evil in my book... [1] http://web.mailana.com/demoday/ http://web.mailana.com/demoday/
- fnid2 17y ago
  What are the benefits? Why couldn't they just have a lightbox appear that says, "Yay! We've invented google buzz, here's a list of people we gathered from your frequent contacts in gmail. Click the check boxes by the people you want to include in your inner circle, or click here to disable Google Buzz."
  - Poiesis 17y ago
    The lightbox: the new modal dialog. "User! Answer this question! Now!" Our user generally doesn't really care about your new feature if they're logging in to check mail; they want to--wait for it--check their mail. Just like users everywhere, they're just going to click on a random button and not even be able to tell you five seconds later whether it said "Go Away" or "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends". [edit:formatting]
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - danieldon 17y ago
      "they want to--wait for it--check their mail" Neither Gmail nor Yahoo are strictly email anymore. If you believe they are are, you're living in a fantasy world. Both have chat, and yahoo even has stuff like calendar and notes. "Webmail" isn't strictly email and it hasn't been for years. "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends" What all of the rabid people like you fail to realize is that no information was actually revealed to anyone in this instance. It was a combination of her misunderstand and a bug in google reader that displayed follower/following lists wrong. Of course, none of you actually care about the facts, you just want to complain.
pasbesoin 17y ago
If all aspects of participation were opt in -- as they should be -- the problem could have been avoided. (It would help if the implications of participation were laid out up front, clearly, as well.) And "opt in" is hardly a new concept. This was totally preventable, through a well-worn paradigm of customer engagement. Google has no excuse for this. They were greedy, and they screwed their customers, big time.
- Vivtek 17y ago
  Totally preventable and entirely foreshadowed by Facebook's failures to think about the same damn issues.
Vivtek 17y ago
On the one hand, I can envision actual engineers saying, "D'oh, we should have thought of that!" And at the same time, I have a hard time imagining that if even I was aware of a lot of furor about Facebook turning on new features that remove previously assumed privacy, the people at Google whose professional interests revolve around these features weren't also aware of that furor. The only real conclusion I can draw is that they just didn't care. Sort of "We're Google, we have vast amounts of data, and we'll do whatever the hell we please with it, and if you have a problem, talk to the hand." I've been given the Google hand to talk to before (most people using AdSense have) and this is really getting to be a problem. And yeah, I'm a freelancer, and yeah, I sometimes use Gmail, and yeah, it's not really a Good Thing for business if my customers can see each other. I'm not in danger of being raped by any of them, mind you, but this just doesn't seem to fall under the aegis of "don't be evil".
wmeredith 17y ago
>Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If anything, I'd say it makes you human.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

The engineers are human. I'm sure they're as horrified as you suggest. Companies are not human, certainly not by default. The vector sum of the effort of many humans is inhuman by default. [1] (Phrases like "mob mentality", "team spirit", and "groupthink" didn't get invented for nothing.) It takes hard work to give a company a human face -- hard work by management, by PR, by customer support, by HR. Some companies are much better at such work than others. --- [1] This is, of course, a perennial topic here on HN: It's easier to run a human company when the company has fewer people. That's one of a startup's advantages. Of course, a company that is too small runs the risk of being too human: Humans, for example, are prone to emotional roller-coastering, can become fixated on the trees instead of seeing the forest, and need at least some sleep every day. A team's inherent "inhumanity" can help smooth out misfeatures like this.

qjz 17y ago
It appears they may have foreseen the outcome and acted deliberately, if this thread at http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google-cared-more-about-design-then-I-might http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google... is any indication. In particular, see Brett Lider's response that includes this excerpt: 'Similar to Facebook being willing to "piss its users off" when it feels the need to make a big change in its service for the long-term good, I see Buzz in Gmail as a relative big change that requires more than one day to adjust to. We've all been on the side of changes in services that we didn't like and either got used to or actually loved in the long run. We think Buzz is one of them. A lot of us here have also been designers on a service that we knew needed to change but was afraid to because of internal momentum or fear of short-term user reactions.' edit: I think the quote stands on its own. They may be horrified, but the action was rooted in a kind of arrogance we often ascribe to inhuman activity, where the impact on other humans wasn't considered thoughtfully or was deliberately ignored.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Yeah, Thinking about this, it seems like Google and Yahoo have been really envying what is effectively Facebook's captive audience. With Facebook, you sign up for "social networking" is essentially an undefined product whose provider has undefined obligations to you. Email involves some explicitly or implicitly understood bounds and so doesn't let the provider sell it users to the same degree - well, unless the email provide just flagrantly violates their implicit obligations - and so the temptation is greater and greater.

tom_rath 17y ago

Time travel would be spiffy, but how easy is it to contact the Buzz engineers now? If you've ever dealt with Google "technical support" (even if you're a customer who shovels them buckets of cash each week) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to reach an actual human being who can help you. Convoluted as it is, getting a blog post ranked top in Hacker News seems the easiest (only?) way to get a genuine Google issue addressed. I hope they address this one AND create an actual means of contacting the people who are supposed to be running the place.

jamesjyu 17y ago
Actually, a friend and I were having a big discussion about Buzz, using Buzz. And, to my surprise, a few Buzz devs jumped into the conversation: http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google-cared-more-about-design-then-I-might http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google...
- jacabado 17y ago
  And then all your privacy concerns quickly disappeared!
  - enomar 17y ago
    It's a public thread. You'd rather the dev's ignore what people say about their product on an open discussion?
    - dasil003 17y ago
      I daresay the point of the comment is its comedic timing (which is brilliant) rather than its veracity (which is dubious)
- AdamN 17y ago
  That's nice that they care more about UI than privacy.
17y ago

petewarden 17y ago

No, they wouldn't. I'm saying this as somebody who built a product around identifying your 'inner circle' from your email patterns[1]. The part I spent the most time on was figuring out how to protect people's privacy, and these scenarios were painfully obvious even to me. Plenty of people at Google have to have thought this through, but decided the benefits to adoption of the current process outweigh the privacy problems that will happen to some people. That's pretty evil in my book... [1] http://web.mailana.com/demoday/ http://web.mailana.com/demoday/

fnid2 17y ago
What are the benefits? Why couldn't they just have a lightbox appear that says, "Yay! We've invented google buzz, here's a list of people we gathered from your frequent contacts in gmail. Click the check boxes by the people you want to include in your inner circle, or click here to disable Google Buzz."
- Poiesis 17y ago
  The lightbox: the new modal dialog. "User! Answer this question! Now!" Our user generally doesn't really care about your new feature if they're logging in to check mail; they want to--wait for it--check their mail. Just like users everywhere, they're just going to click on a random button and not even be able to tell you five seconds later whether it said "Go Away" or "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends". [edit:formatting]
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - danieldon 17y ago
    "they want to--wait for it--check their mail" Neither Gmail nor Yahoo are strictly email anymore. If you believe they are are, you're living in a fantasy world. Both have chat, and yahoo even has stuff like calendar and notes. "Webmail" isn't strictly email and it hasn't been for years. "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends" What all of the rabid people like you fail to realize is that no information was actually revealed to anyone in this instance. It was a combination of her misunderstand and a bug in google reader that displayed follower/following lists wrong. Of course, none of you actually care about the facts, you just want to complain.

pasbesoin 17y ago

If all aspects of participation were opt in -- as they should be -- the problem could have been avoided. (It would help if the implications of participation were laid out up front, clearly, as well.) And "opt in" is hardly a new concept. This was totally preventable, through a well-worn paradigm of customer engagement. Google has no excuse for this. They were greedy, and they screwed their customers, big time.

Vivtek 17y ago
Totally preventable and entirely foreshadowed by Facebook's failures to think about the same damn issues.

Vivtek 17y ago

On the one hand, I can envision actual engineers saying, "D'oh, we should have thought of that!" And at the same time, I have a hard time imagining that if even I was aware of a lot of furor about Facebook turning on new features that remove previously assumed privacy, the people at Google whose professional interests revolve around these features weren't also aware of that furor. The only real conclusion I can draw is that they just didn't care. Sort of "We're Google, we have vast amounts of data, and we'll do whatever the hell we please with it, and if you have a problem, talk to the hand." I've been given the Google hand to talk to before (most people using AdSense have) and this is really getting to be a problem. And yeah, I'm a freelancer, and yeah, I sometimes use Gmail, and yeah, it's not really a Good Thing for business if my customers can see each other. I'm not in danger of being raped by any of them, mind you, but this just doesn't seem to fall under the aegis of "don't be evil".

wmeredith 17y ago

>Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If anything, I'd say it makes you human.