

How to Do Everything in Google Buzz (Including Turn It Off)  - ashishbharthi
http://www.fastcompany.com/1546226/how-to-do-everything-in-google-buzz-including-turn-it-off

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MikeCapone
My experience with Google Buzz so far has been that everybody on it is
complaining, but everybody's writing tons of comments and entries and starting
discussions in a way that I haven't seen on Twitter or even Facebook.

Maybe it's just the crowd I hang with, but to me that seems to be a good sign
(not the complaining, but how it sucks you in and makes it easy to
participate).

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jff
My friends and I have been posting a lot too, but mostly we've been posting
"YOU BUZZIN BRO?" and "Buzz sucks".

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rwhitman
The thing that pisses me off about Buzz is the fact that it just arrogantly
assumed that A) I wanted to be a part of it and B) that it had the right to
determine what my friend relationships are.

I really feel like a social network needs to gain my trust and acceptance
before I join it. I just don't want people "friending" their way into my life
without my consent. I really felt like my Gmail was violated by some annoying
machine that muscled its way in, demanded I interact with it and then flooded
my inbox with comments by all the most irritating people I've deliberately
unfriended elsewhere.

I'm sorry but I'm just not letting Google circumvent the community building
pathway that every other social network has had to endure. Switched off.

~~~
jeffmould
I couldn't agree more. There are some people who I send emails to that are not
my friends, nor do I want to socially interact with them, and to assume that
because I sent something through gmail to them that they are indeed my friend
is a huge issue for me.

I like the concept behind Buzz and think it has potential, but they should not
auto-follow people in your contact list by default.

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waterlesscloud
I enjoyed this little experiment. See people talking about privacy issues in
Buzz threads:

<https://mail.google.com/mail/?uip=1#buzz/search/privacy>

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tokenadult
Interesting that I can see this, which I suppose is your point. I liked this
comment: "Why use FB if I can import all my friends and stop visiting the site
and its shitty, never ending stream of Farmville or whatever other moron game
is currently in vogue."

That's why there is space to compete with Facebook.

P.S. I like too that Google Buzz posts can be edited, as posts can be edited
here (for a time).

P.P.S. AFTER EDIT: I see Google Buzz is actually less usable than Facebook, by
quite a lot, in setting up particular groups of friends to see messages that
are not world-viewable. There is a lot of battling back and forth among
feature sets. I like that Buzz posts are editable. I like that a lot. But Buzz
still needs work in other aspects of the user experience.

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mattwdelong
It's funny that the first thing people ask is how to turn it off. If you are
reading these comments only opposed to reading the entire article, then you
can just goto the bottom of the page and under gmail views there is a link to
turn it off. Seemingly simple, but very obscure location.

~~~
est
technically it's just hiding. I hope I can delete this service completely in
Google Dashboard.

