image by by maxxxim via CCC.
So even I, a so-called Internet guru, got screwed by the Google Buzz’s fiasco.
Google Buzz suggested to my Ex that she might want to follow some of my friends. Some of these friends are of course, people I have become friends with SINCE we split up. Each suggestion included a name and sometimes even a nice little square profile pictures.
As you might imagine, most ex-spouses REALLY do not want to share that type of info with each other.
By now, most people have heard the story - Google failed to inform people about the effects of the default privacy settings. On Facebook, many users have gotten savy at using Facebook’s privacy settings to help manage who sees what. Facebook has also made good progress at simplifying their settings so that you don’t need a engineering degree to figure it out.
Google has actually done a descent job of implementing privacy features. You can even have public vs private postings, placing Google Buzz somewhere “between” Facebook and Twitter.
By default, Buzz’s privacy settings same are actually the same as Facebook’s.
Google’s biggest mistake – was the (now defunct) ”Auto Follow” feature. Basically Google automatically added people from Google Contact lists as people you would want to follow. And since the default privacy settings shared that data, people inside your GMail contact lists ended up revealed to other Google Buzz users.
To understand the issue, I include this little fictional story:
1) You login to Gmail and see the new Buzz icon. You click on it.
2) Google invites you to create a profile and you do so. (with the original default privacy settings ), allowing people to see your followers. This is equivalent to Facebook’s friend-of-friends setting, which is also turned on by default!
3) Google then automatically followed people in your contact list: For example, your mistress’s Buzz account.
4) Your mistress has a public Flickr account with pictures of your recent trip to Jamaica, including the seemingly innocuous photo of you waving as you stand outside the Montego Bay airport.
5) Your wife logs into her gmail account, and clicks on the new Buzz link.
6) Your wife is automatically subscribed to YOUR account.
7 ) Your wife looks at your Buzz profile and sees your mistress’s Buzz account listed.
8) Wife wife sees pictures of you in Jamaica. You said you were on that boring business trip.
9) You go home and find out you need to hire a lawyer.
Ouch.
What is worse, is that simply selecting on the Buzz icon in your gmail caused your profile to be automatically created, and people to automatically be added to your list. Many people clicked on it, just to “try it out” without understanding the impact of what was happening.
This also could have been avoided if Buzz had not been automatically added to GMail. But actually this was a brilliant business move, and I don’t fault Google for taking this strategy.
All the of greatest engineering means nothing if people don’t show up and create content. You can actually have a crappy site with all sorts of problems, but if you have enough content and users people will still use it (anobody remember Myspace?). Meanwhile Google already had a very well designed social network: Orkut. But unless you live in India or Brazil, you don’t use it.
Integrating Buzz into GMail gave Google an instant social network. Automatic adding users feeds from Flickr, Twitter and Picasa gives them “instant” content that people may already be following. How many people would use Facebook if our friends and family were somewhere else? Google may find out.
So Google basically flipped a switch, performed the largest instant “launch” of a social network in the history of the internet! Google instantly created a huge and functional social network with millions of users in just days (according to their own blog).
But for the first 4 days of service (and many people didn’t getted added until day 2 or 3), Gmail users ended up having some of their contacts (at least the ones with Buzz accounts) automatically added to their list of followers, just by hitting the new Buzz link in their GMail accounts. Th caused outrage for some people – including one woman who who’s crazy ex-husband found her via Google Buzz.
So instead of the well scripted Google media rollout Google wanted, they every newscaster in the world interviewing angry Buzz users. “Bad Google!” “Google Buzz exposes your contact list” was twittered everywhere. “Google Buzz is evil”. Many users felt betrayed by a company that had promised to “Do no evil”.
Some Google Buzz users also got miffed at how Buzz automatically shared their public Picasa and Google Reader shares. Of course, this information had ALREADY BEEN MADE open to public by those users. Buzz didn’t actually make them more public, they just made them easier for other people to find.
The Fix : No more Auto-Follow
However since then, Google had made a few important improvements: On the 4th day of the launch, Google announced it had removed Auto-Follow and replaced it with “Auto-Suggest”. It still uses your contact list to suggest new Buzz accounts, but it no longer adds them without your permission.
I feel a little sorry for Google. I think Google has actually built a rather clever new service, but failed to predict some of the possible outcomes. It’s really easy to underestimate what can happen in social networks this large and complicated. Had Google been starting from scratch with a zero-content network and had to build up content and users from there they wouldn’t have had this issue. But orkut followed that model and already failed.
Google has already mastered re-synthisizing existing data lying around the internet and making it more accessible and useful. So it makes sense that they would re-use the same strategy by integrating Gmail, Picasa, Flickr, and Twitter feeds to instantly create a huge but integrated social network with both users and content.
The mistake was that during all that design and testing, Google neclected to remember how much many people hate other people. Turns out – we email people we dislike A LOT! Some people get hate email. Lots of the people in users Contact lists are NOT OUR FRIENDS. Assuming that they were was a huge blunder.
Oops.
In the end, people will come back - assuming that they find their friends there. If anything, I think Buzz may eventually HELP users understand exactly how much of their data is already out there in the public.
Next: I’ll post about what I think Buzz is doing right, how I think Google Buzz could actually be a very big game changer in social networking.
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