I’m underwhelmed by Buzz for several reasons: (1) big hype, (2) little privacy, (3) harder to kill than a zombie. At the end of this post, you’ll find some tips on how to undo what Google did.
1) The hype level is amazing: Mashable‘s citing big stats on the numbers of Buzz users and posts – but when you consider the involuntary users (people who were, astonishingly, opted in by Google simply by virtue of having a Gmail account) and the buzzes being piped in from Twitter, FB, … sources, I think actual use of Buzz is way lower than they’re touting. The few people I know who have experimented with it (including me) essentially have wired up their existing Google Readers, Twitters, and other accounts, and aren’t creating original content there. So it’s not a source; it’s just an aggregator – from that perspective and as an actual discussion platform, I consider FriendFeed superior in many regards.
2) It’s concerning that Google seemingly didn’t think through the privacy and security implications well enough before imposing Gbuzz on all Gmail users. It’s no one’s business but mine who else I email. Automatically building follower lists AND automatically exposing them in people’s profiles, before they even know they have Buzz profiles, is astonishing. I’m glad Google has taken some steps after the initial uproar to address this, but that’s not enough. For instance, I don’t want people following me without my express permission; and no, it’s not good enough to give me a ‘block’ option to remove them afterward.
3) Most disturbingly, ‘turn off Buzz’ doesn’t seem to really turn it off. I just did an experiment in which I:
– posted a single buzz comment, and connected a public Flickr stream to account 1, which caused it to pick up a public photo posted months ago and include it in account1’s buzz stream
– confirmed that account2, which was (automatically) following account1, could see the buzz and photo
– went back to account1 and disconnected all services, unfollowed everyone, and “turned off Buzz”
But from account2, I can still see account1’s existence, profile, and the buzz and photo that were previously picked up.
If someone ‘turns off Buzz’, wouldn’t it be logical that they probably don’t still want their profile and stream to be visible?!
Account1 shouldn’t have to re-enable Buzz, go to the list of followers and block them all, then turn buzz off again, in order to achieve that objective. But now, that’s what I’m going to do (and if that doesn’t remove account1’s buzz from account2’s stream, I’ll manually delete everything in account1’s buzz stream and post a followup.)
IMHO Buzz isn’t ready for prime time yet. Maybe Gmail stayed ‘in beta’ longer than it needed to, but GBuzz seriously needed some alpha and beta runtime to catch and fix these kinds of issues before a broader rollout.
Update: re-enabling Buzz, deleting the buzz posts, and blocking account2 seemed to do the trick for taking account1’s posts out of account2’s stream. I’ve now removed all posts and all following/followers from account1 anyway, and turned Buzz back off, just to be on the safe side. But account1’s profile still seems to be publicly viewable (perhaps because it’s a Gchat buddy) to account2 – not obvious how to roll that back. And account2 still says it’s following account1, even though account1 blocked account2. What does it mean to be able to block someone, if their account thinks they’re still following you (and you’re still in their list of people they’re following, a list which they might be exposing publicly?) Also, be aware that if you block a follower, it’ll be hard to find that person again to unblock them, and blocking may have consequences that go beyond Buzz.
Further update: There’s a blog post at http://nobuzzingmail.blogspot.com/2010/02/now-google-says-we-quickly-realized.html which shows a screen shot of the Buzz settings tab and a ‘completely disable’ option at bottom. But it’s far from obvious, and not that easy to even get this tab into your Settings (supposed to be able to enable the tab via Labs, but that path isn’t working at present). The best official page I’ve found which describes how to unbuzz is at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=171460 – but the choices it describes still leave a lot to be desired. The most complete removal option requires deleting your Google public profile (which is not unique to Buzz). Having trouble finding your Google profile? Try https://www.google.com/profiles/me . There’s a link for deleting your profile once you go into ‘edit my profile’ (https://www.google.com/profiles/me/editprofile) – it’s WAY at the bottom: https://www.google.com/profiles/me/deleteprofile .
Feb. 17, 2010 update: Google has somewhat changed ‘how to unbuzz’ yourself. I found several good articles via BlogHer (Cnet, ABDPBT, angelynnodom)