I smiled when I first read the Google Buzz announcement on February 9. I liked what I saw about a new online sharing experience, something to compete with Twitter and Facebook.
I’m always game for testing new things out, being an early adopter of online media tools. People asked me what I thought, what I liked; and I was so excited with my initial experiments that I wrote a roundup blog post three days later wherein I elaborated why Google Buzz is so important.
I enjoyed writing that. The same day, though, folks like Alex Howard wrote about privacy concerns with Buzz. I guess the taste of the Google Buzz Kool-Aid captivated me.
Google Buzz remains important — but not for reasons I fathomed 10 days ago. There are too many faults, primarily because Google failed to follow the modus operandi of social media: ask your customers first.
Buzz product manager Todd Jackson admits his team screwed up. In an interview with the BBC, he said one reason is because Buzz was tested by 20,000 Google employees and affiliates but not the general public. The other reason is because it was assumed GMail users would like the Buzz integration, and nobody thought about offering the tool to non-GMail users.
The kicker of the interview (to me) is in this extract:
Many of the firm’s new services are tested by the so-called Google Trusted Tester program, a network of friends and family of Google employees who are given confidential access to products before they launch.
Buzz was not tested by this program.
Why not? I think that would have cured many of the ailments people are blogging and tweeting and complaining around the web. But hey. There’s something to be written here about hindsight being 20/20.
I didn’t like the fact that Buzz tied itself into my GMail program nor that my Google profile had a specific Buzz tab. After following directions how to separate myself from Buzz, my email and profile experiences were clean.
I don’t agree with the groundswell that Google Buzz sucks, but there are some deficiencies that need to be corrected. Maybe I’ll try out Buzz again if and when it launches as a stand-alone program, like Google Earth or Google Reader. Until then, I’ll watch from afar.
If you want to dissociate your account from Buzz, you need to:
1. Edit your profile and click the red link at the bottom to delete it.
2. Confirm your selection on the next screen. That deletes it from your profile.
3. Log into GMail, scroll to the screen bottom, and click “turn off Buzz.”
4. Click into your GMail settings and uncheck the button to display Buzz.
5. Refresh your page and it’s gone.
{ 23 comments }
Just the fact that you have to sign in to GMail is the biggest turn off for me. I have multiple email accounts and I aggregate them all to my Outlook 2010 Beta (love the new outlook BTW!) and I don’t use the web version, so Buzz is utterly worthless to me….
If they were to make it an actual social media site, and allow adobe air apps to be made (or even better let Tweetdeck integrate it) then I might use it. Personally, I have too much to do with the several Twitter accounts and Facebook already.
.-= From Keith@ Blog Tips to you: 4 Tips To Get More Blog Exposure Via Twitter =-.
I’m surprised such a web geek is using a Micro$oft desktop email client. GMail aside, why no switch to webmail? Don’t want the convenience?
After using Thunderbird portable on my flash drive to manage my gmails/domain accounts, no way that I can go back to a non-portable client. Web mail like gmail is nice, but I can’t manage my domain mail accounts through it.
.-= From Kaelos @ Yaro Starak Ebook to you: Become a Blogger Premium by Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick =-.
@Kaelos But you can just import your domain mail accounts into gmail. In fact the Gmail spam filter is so good, that I have no problem with spam in spite that my domain email shows on my web-page without any masking to avoid email collecting robots. Gmail also also allows to have a downloaded version on i.e. Firefox or Chrome, in which you can manage all the mails the last year while being off-line.
Twitter: DannyBrown
February 23, 2010 at 9:18 AM
I can’t help but notice the irony of the Buzz It button at the bottom of the post, Ari
I think I switched Buzz off about an hour after switching it on, for the very reasons it clearly wasn’t thought through. Contacts of my contacts appearing, public info available? Not Google’s best introduction of a new product.
I’ll keep check on it for future use, but as of now, I’m like you – a non-Buzzer.
.-= From Danny Brown to you: Little Green Men =-.
I don’t use Reddit or MySpace, but those buttons are there. I’ll continue to support social bookmarking and social sharing (is that redundant?) icons for people to click if they are active on those services.
It seems like Google launched the product because Google wanted it, hence the internal testing and no focus groups.
Twitter: DannyBrown
February 23, 2010 at 2:51 PM
But you’re not complaining about Reddit or MySpace, are you?
.-= From Danny Brown to you: Little Green Men =-.
Touche. But social bookmarking is not about me; only about you.
FYI: That icon is now gone — as part of a larger tactic to remove plugins that involve external web tools that, if someone wants to use it, they know how.
Ari,
I saw your post minutes after I became enraged when, once again, Google closed my Gmail and replaced it with a Google Buzz promotion (I’m already using it, for heaven’s sake!). So I had to go log back in to Gmail, all the time muttering and mumbling … signing off Google Buzz (thanks for telling me how). It wouldn’t let me delete some annoying follower that I don’t know anyway!
Sadly, it turns out that disabling Buzz means I have to delete my Google profile, and since I have a Google blog … ugh … it’s not really a good thing to delete the profile.
They are not mutual. Deleting your profile does not delete your blog. Besides, once you delete the profile… you can then recreate it, as I did.
I’m with Danny:
I can’t help but notice the irony of the Buzz It button at the bottom of the post, Ari
I read Ken Auletta’s book Googled a while back and did a review on my site:
I find it interesting that, in its quest not to be evil, Google continues to make some of the same mistakes that are causing others to view it that way.
.-= From Phil Simon to you: Technology Today #18: Laura Schoppe on The Virtual Company =-.
If you hadn’t read this blog post, would you have commented such? Alternatively, regardless of the noted irony, allow me to suppose you or John or Jim or Lucille is a Google Buzz addict. Should I not have an icon for them despite the above content?
Do you think it’s a little along the principle of “I gave you this car for free so I can use it any time I please,” for example? Seems like a bit of inebriation by philanthropic arrogance, that someone concluded, heck, we give this stuff all away for free so we can damn well step in and do what we want, when we want, and it’s our right, we gave you all this in the first place for nothin’!” Living in the House of Google who are we to expect them to call before stopping by, to knock before entering? “Privacy? Well, it’s MY house…”
Just makes me wonder, what were they thinking? Why not go the polite, cautious, courteous route to asking? What did they have to lose by not asking? I personally didn’t have any embarassing or compromising revelations come forth as a result of the uninvited connections (well, maybe because I hardly have any, huh?!). And actually I thought it was cool that people who may have not come together on their own were sort of thrown in the same room together with the opportunity to say hello, and I’m kind of disappointed that people seemed so uncomfortable leaving their familiar cliques and looked down on the unexpected guests as “intruders.” I think that says a lot in itself and almost justifies the “experiment.”
But again, aside from the possibility that it was an experiment they thought they could afford to attempt, I just don’t understand why they didn’t adhere to a protocol they obviously know exists in this realm. I mean, they haven’ t been sleeping through Facebook’s blunders, now, have they?
So maybe that’s it; they had a lot to gain learning about human nature when the street urchin shows up at the cocktail party. And maybe we’ve learned a lot about ourselves.
I haven’t gotten into it for one reason: I just don’t want yet another social media account to manage.
Twitter-this, facebook-that, friendfeed-this, buzz-that, + email/im.. it’s just getting crazy. Sometimes you need to find that 20% of activities that are giving you 80% of your results and eliminate the rest.
.-= From Kaelos @ Yaro Starak Ebook to you: Become a Blogger Premium by Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick updated Tue Feb 9 2010 4:09 pm CST =-.
Good point. Earlier this morning, partially because of earlier comments on the issue and also because I want to reduce the number of plugins loading every time a page loads, I disabled a few plugins that existed yesterday — such as the button for Google Buzz and another set of bookmarking icons. If someone wants to bookmark it, they know how.
Great points here. I’m not quit sure of the business application (yet) of Buzz, but I am using it very differently from other social media. I’m using it much less frequently than Facebook and Twitter and I more careful about what I share. After all, most people following me on buzz have emailed me in the past.
.-= From John Haydon to you: Facebook Pages And Facebook Groups – The Ultimate Nonprofit Cheat Sheet =-.
I still like Buzz and I don’t think there’s a problem for it being integrated into Gmail. Yes, it’s true that it would be whole lot better if there was a Buzz-only site that would enable us to use Buzz without going to Gmail, but integrating into Gmail is good for some people like me who don’t like to keep lots of tabs open (already two always, Facebook and Gmail
).
.-= From Aminul Islam Sajib to you: Do You Need A Google Wave Invitation? =-.
Twitter: bloggingj
August 21, 2010 at 2:29 AM
I haven’t disabled Buzz although I don’t use it. It’s just lying in one corner of my G-mail.
Saksham recently wrote 4 Types Of Blogs…
You don’t use but haven’t disabled; why not?
Hi Ari,
I found this post by looking for any new info about Google Buzz, has it essentially been removed from Google? I ask because it was a pretty neat tool and yet I don’t see it anywhere anymore, much like Wave and seemingly everything else Google has tried lately. Oh well, at least there is always Gmail.
I also disabled my google buzz. Because I noticed it’s less value.
rijans recently wrote How to Completely Block Any Website in a Windows Computer
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