Google Buzz?

So Google has started a new social networking site called "Google Buzz," which they tied directly with their Gmail service. Uncharacteristically for Google, they really screwed the pooch coming out of the gate on this one. They more or less automatically assumed that you would want people you contact regularly to be automatically put on a list to "follow" you, and they buried a number of privacy settings, making it hard to tell what you were or were not posting publicly. In fact, when I briefly clicked over to "Buzz" in my Gmail account, I spotted a public conversation between my brother and my sister, in which they both wondered whether others could see the conversation.

I've since discovered the link at the bottom of Gmail which lets you turn Buzz off, and did so immediately. I've got Facebook and the blog to meet my social networking needs. Google's got little to add, in my opinion.

Here's where I think they really messed up. People use e-mail for fundamentally private communication. You directly control, in each and every message, who receives it. Indeed, you have no choice but to specify, in every message, who is to receive it. It makes little sense to build a social networking on top of a medium used primarily for private communication.

Facebook is a fundamentally public place (you assume everything you're doing is going to be public to the world, unless you take some specific steps to restrict access to something). You can send a private message, but doing so is the exception, not the rule; going to send a personal private message takes extra steps, steps which allow you to see and understand that this particular communication will be private.

By contrast, though, the built-in assumption is that e-mail is private. By building a public social networking site on top of it, Google is making its core e-mail users suddenly mistrust that their e-mails will stay private. Even assuming that people are clamoring for yet another general social networking service, Google should have kept it separate entirely from Gmail. Google thinks it can salvage the service with prompt changes to make options clearer, make it much more opt-in than opt-out, and likely some other forthcoming tweaks.

I think they will have to reconsider even further. They should either ditch the service or entirely sever it from Gmail, immediately. They have too much at stake. If users mistrust the confidentiality of their e-mail, they'll start using one of the MANY readily available alternatives. Moreover, the failure of the Buzz team to anticipate the vehement objections which surfaced immediately indicates that the leaders of the new Google service have some fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of the Gmail service and their customers for that service. Who knows, then, what other flaws are lurking beneath the surface, waiting to explode. Google should yank the service, put some new leadership on the team, reconfigure it fundamentally, and then relaunch it, NOT tied to Gmail.

But maybe I'm missing something? Anybody else tried it? I saw in my brief look that our long-lost guest blogger Fern had tried it out a bit. If she still reads us, perhaps she'll give us her impression.

Update: Imagine you woke up one day and found out that somebody had created a Facebook account for you, and created a list of people they thought were your friends, and made that list of friends publicly available. How pissed would you be? Well, that's exactly what Google did.

Update: Here's a graphic description of one female bloggers privacy issues caused my Google's MASSIVE screw-up. I predict that within 2 days, maybe 1, they will have done as I suggested and completely yanked the service, and it will set them back a year or more in their expansion plans. They've destroyed a LOT of trust here... and they just may have created themselves some legal liability, too.

Update: The man responsible for all this appears to be Todd Jackson, director of the Gmail service. The Gmail service is phenomenal, but this really should result in Jackson being fired. To create an entirely new social networking service and automatically enter all of your customers from an entirely un-related product into the new service is stupid beyond belief. I've spotted several victims of stalking or domestic violence who are terribly afraid right now, because Google has stupidly made public a whole bunch of information about who these people regularly correspond with, which will make it much easier to find them.