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Comment by heed | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I get it. Is Google supposed to get everything right on their first try? It seems many people would say yes, even many users of HackerNews. This is very counter to my understanding of the philosophies shared around here. I always thought it was best to push an new idea out there as fast as you can and iterate as you go. Granted Google's mistake is a BIG mistake, but condemning them for one act is somewhat irrational, no?

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Certainly no one expects anyone to get everything right in their first try. One expects to see a few bugs here and there in the first release and that is fine. In the case of Google Buzz, the basic idea of the product that 'all your frequent email contacts are your friends' is flawed. The manner in which they rolled it out without any regard for the privacy of its users is most disconcerting.

Well Google's play book used to be push stuff out as beta or a labs feature. Let only the very sophisticated users opt-in and try things out before pushing it out to the general public.

This was obviously rolled out in a very different fashion. Plus they attached it to Gmail which is a tried-and-true product. Buzz feels very beta to me.

If Buzz we rolled out under labs or a separate interface I'm sure that there wouldn't be as much backlash as there has been.

Perhaps, but I think for this particular market they had no choice but to launch big. Look at Orkut, their previous (dead) attempt at a social network. Facebook is extremely entrenched now, and there's little to no incentive to users to opt-in to something else. To attack the power of Facebook/Twitter, this was really the only way of doing it (although I agree, perhaps a Labs feature would have been a better way of introducing the concept for a couple of months at first).

Orkut is hardly dead, just because a product isn't popular in your market doesn't mean it's dead.

It's dead for the market that includes its developers as members. Reflexively dead, as it were. It becomes a lot harder to care about maintaining something once you yourself no longer get anything out of using it.

Orkut engineering is in India and Brazil.

I agree with you that Google has their work cut out for them trying to get into this market, but that doesn't excuse their mistake.

If you think it does then I am very curious to hear how you felt when Microsoft leveraged their desktop strength to compete with Netscape in the browser wars.

Well if they weren't going to get it right first try, then maybe they should have a done a small early rollout. Surely one the first 1000 users would have noticed the privacy issue and reported it, before it was a big deal.

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