Hands on with Google’s Buzz (kill)
The idea sounds great: let people connect to those they’ve emailed using their Google account. Let them share Twitter updates, show pages they’ve visited, videos they’ve watched on YouTube and swap more online content than ever before.
Yes, it’s a lovely idea, but, in practise, it has proved to be a dramatic failure.
When Buzz was launched, a Google algorithm selected up to 50 contacts of each account holder to ‘follow’ users’ updates. This auto-follow system may have been easily customisable – if users had known that it was in place. However, many people suddenly found themselves revealing personal information to clients, ex-partners, parents and people they hadn’t even been in contact with for years. Less than ideal.
The security flaws didn’t stop there. Having connected account holders to other contacts without their permission, Google then published lists of users’ connections on the internet. Suddenly everyone knew that Joe Bloggs had been emailing the CEO of a rival company and Sally Smith had been in contact with a psychiatrist. Users who had deliberately kept their identities private when emailing suddenly found them revealed, complete with headshot.
With their lack of regard for users’ privacy, one has to question whether the Google team was living under a rock during the Facebook security debacle last year. Otherwise, they would have realised that users really object to their information being shared without their permission. Furthermore, the security violation is worse with email; email is password-protected for a reason: because it is personal and it is private.
Although the public reaction was far removed from Google’s hopes, bad publicity is better than no publicity. Without the furore surrounding the security risks, there wouldn’t actually be that much to say about the programme. It’s selling point is that it allows people to connect at a deeper level, combining Twitter-style updates with the chance for users to share content from other websites, such as Google Reader and YouTube.
Oh wait, you can already do that on Twitter. And Facebook.
Buzz makes these things nice and simple, presenting contacts’ status updates in an easy to read list, but at the moment it isn’t offering any serious competition to the social networking giants.
There’s no denying that Google Buzz could be potentially useful for businesses, enabling them to share data privately in a way they couldn’t on other social networking sites. However, it seems that the company tried to release something too big, too soon. After the public outcry surrounding Buzz (and a possible investigation by the Federal Trade Commission) future products are going to come under heavy scrutiny. While I’m not giving up my Gmail account just yet, the company are going to have to work hard to regain users’ trust in the long-term.
