An update on Buzz | Hacker News Reader

An update on Buzz

googleblog.blogspot.com

42 pointsfogus31 comments

Hey Google (I know you guys lurk here),

Where is Buzz for Google Apps users - specifically corporate Apps users? From a personal point of view, I find Buzz completely uninteresting. But as a collaborative tool, I would love it.

Yammer is basically what I'm looking for, but for some reason they haven't done Google Apps integration.

I suppose an alternate question would be: Hey Yammer - why no Google Apps integration?

And if you do, do it such that company-private stays company-private, please!

Absolutely. We're using Salesforce's Chatter internally, but if a Google Apps (internal-only) Buzz were present, it would have been a no-brainer.

It does seem a bit odd that a tool that is ripe for collaboration is not available to the organizations that use Google Apps. I don't need to collaborate with my friends on anything, but I need to collaborate with my colleagues daily.

Personally, I'd liked to have seen Wave integrated. Hey ho.

While we're asking, my question: Is Buzz going to make it?

I've thought of starting/transferring some activity to it, but -- especially after the demise of Wave, as well as some other Google products with lower adoption -- I've hesitated out of concern it may well soon be whacked.

As I've said before, I was unhappy with the initial deployment, but I'd prefer not to see Google leave the "social communication" space altogether. And the bit of Buzz I've seen seems to have fostered more interesting and informative conversations than FB, Twitter, etc. (Partly probably the early/informed adopter thing. Partly reasonable message length in combination with lack of noise and distractions.)

Seriously, I want this so bad. I LOVED Buzz when I worked at Google, and I desperately want this for my new company's GAFYD.

A huge challenge for the big tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.) will be how to offer unprecedented convenience without stirring up privacy concerns.

The company that can best walk this tightrope will win.

Some of the areas we'll see this in are:

- social search

- location-based services

- personalized recommendations

- purchasing history (think Blippy + Amazon)

- social network ranking and filtering (along the lines of what Buzz was doing)

I wouldn't include Apple in that list. I don't think they get it.

The big question for me is, will users be willing to give one big player all their data? Or will we have a system, much like in personal financing, in which many individuals "invest" their data with several companies and use "brokers" to manage it. I want to favor the latter paradigm because this way, you don't have one big player locking it down at users' expense.

Google and Facebook playing keep-away with each other opens up a big opportunity for the small guys to come in and be that one broker who will help users manage their location-based data, their status updates, etc and offer them great services. Greplin is one such player and I'm sure there will be others.

Hah, I had expected this to be an announcement on discontinuing Buzz, but apparently they have a multi-year plan ready.

Tons of people use Buzz, and it's pretty obvious that it's going to be part of their rumored "Circles" social network.

Yea, if it ever launches.

I'm kind of expecting it to end any day soon, I guess the next announcement will be "ditch Buzz welcome Circle".

I clicked on the link hoping that it was an announcement about decentralizing Buzz, Ostatus style.

It would have definitely gotten me on board. I'd have brought along as many Twitter and Facebook friends as possible, too.

Odd choice of title. I would have thought the post would be about where Buzz is going as a service, or perhaps what pieces of the the made it to other services.

Well worded blog post titles, matter, people.

I thought that same thing... It's a update on buzz' privacy data leak not the service. I would like Google to add Buzz support for Google Apps for Domains and an iPhone app.

Google doesn't have to worry about SEO I guess ;)

I've never understood why Buzz faced an FTC investigation but Facebook never has. Or has it?

I think the main initial sin of buzz, is that they launched the service from Gmail without any warning the people were going to have their contact lists suddenly exposed without oversight to other people on their contact lists.

There were several horror stories about violent ex-husbands suddenly seeing the new boyfriend's contact information and the like.

Gmail users hadn't signed up for "a social network", just an email account with a contact list they had every right to assume was private.

Gmail automatically adds people to your contact list, too. It wasn't merely a contact list that was exposed; it was every Gmail user you'd ever talked to.

My problem with buzz is that it uses my Email address as my social network. Am I alone or is it common that there's a pretty big barrier between personal email and social account?

A privacy review sounds great - once every two years sounds terrible. This isn't the 1950s, Products are changed and released in months, if not weeks.

And yet, I can't find a way to delete my Buzz account without removing my Google account.

Settings->Buzz->Disable Google Buzz

This will disable Google Buzz in Gmail and delete your Google Profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone that you are following.

So does that affect the people you follow or who follow you in Google Reader? I've been hesitant to do this, because I've never been able to find an answer to that question. I've read through seemingly related articles on help.google.com a couple times (including just now), but it's never been clear to me with a comfortable level of certainty. The whole "connected sites" thing is a bit confusing...

I think Google Reader functionality is separate. It was at launch, anyway. I'm pretty sure I've disabled and re-enabled Buzz in the past without killing my shared Google Reader feed.

It's slightly confusing because Buzz has always made it really easy to aggregate lots of different feeds.

I just did it and there was a warning about unfollowing everyone in Google Reader.

Do you mean the warning was there to tell you that you would need to manually unfollow everyone in Google Reader, or that it was there to tell you that everyone in Google Reader would be unfollowed by disabling Buzz?

I believe it was the latter but I don't follow anyone so I didn't read it all that carefully. You get to the warning before confirming that you want to disable Buzz, so try it out.

https://profiles.google.com/

Click "Edit Profile", then "Delete profile and disable Google Buzz completely" at the bottom.

Google settles with FTC on Buzz: http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/google-buzz-ftc-settlement/

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