

Google changes Buzz to be opt-in and adds easy delete button - spicyj
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html

======
cgranade
I honestly love Buzz, but the rollout was terribly executed. It's rather
ironic, since the product itself is one of the better designed social
networking tools I've seen. Like Beacon was a real defining moment for
Facebook, though, I think that the monumental amount of criticism that Google
has taken over the Buzz rollout will teach them to be more careful about the
second-order privacy implications from now on. It's just a shame that it took
this much damage for them to learn.

~~~
malbiniak
Can you articulate why you love Buzz?

~~~
cgranade
For one, the use of open standards promises wide interoperability in the
future. Right now, my first six tabs are Gmail, FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter,
Voice and Wave. I'd love it if those were somehow tied such that I could look
in one place for my news, but if doing so didn't tie me to a monopoly.

Second, I love Buzz for the same reasons I love FriendFeed. It aggregates my
interactions, which goes a long way towards healing the massive fragmentation
problem that I currently have with social networks.

Third, the integration with Gmail means that, much like Mozilla's Raindrop
project consolidates communication, my inbox is replaced by a more generic
inflow.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_the massive fragmentation problem that I currently have with social
networks._

I've always thought that the tendency to view social network fragmentation as
some sort of _problem_ , rather than as a rather useful _feature_ , is a major
blind spot for programmers. This Buzz debacle does nothing to discourage that
hypothesis.

I blame the database training. After you've spent enough time wrestling
databases you begin to dream of putting the universe into normal form. You
envision a world where every piece of data might be seamlessly linked to any
other with some sort of super-powered JOIN command. This is the dream that
leads people to think that single-sign-on across the entire web would be a
great thing. Unfortunately, this dream is also Orwell's nightmare.

I have a lot of friends. Some of them are elderly former carpenters who have
never used computers. Some of them are college-aged aspiring hackers. Some
know me personally. Some know me mainly as a pseudonym on HN. Some of them are
middle-aged hippie folk musicians. Some of them work for major military
contractors. Some of them are professors on the tenure track. Some of them
barely have a high school education. Some of them are millionaires. Some of
them are unemployed. Some of them are theoretical physicists, but many more of
them loathed high school physics.

I have no particular desire to put all of these people in the same room at the
same time. The one occasion where I was compelled to approximate that even
slightly -- my wedding -- was the occasion of more than a little stress,
despite every single guest's friendliness and good cheer. Because it's really
very difficult to throw a party where everyone you know feels equally welcome.

I would not be surprised to discover that social networks are going to remain
fragmented because most people like them that way.

~~~
cgranade
No, but fragmentation with respect to single individuals is devestating. Do I
send someone an IM, an e-mail, a Twitter DM, a phone call, a voicemail, an
InMail, a FB message or poke, a letter, a buzz or what? If I have confidence
that the target of my communications will notice my message regardless, then
that is a feature to me. Moreover, if I want to follow a friend of mine, then
I rarely want to setup and maintain another account, as is often required
these days. Within a given social network, there's lots of room for clique-
forming. There's even room for fragmentation between networks, so long as
communication between networks can happen in a relatively transparent fashion.

------
grosen
This just shows how poor Google's think tank model of operation is. I mean how
can all those people working on the Buzz team overlook this? With all their
time spent analyzing which shade of blue they should use why not just ask
people how they feel about an auto following model?

~~~
gfodor
Yes, I think in this particular case although it's admirable they moved
quickly to correct the major problems this is definitely revealing a weakness
in Google's ability to understand humans and their "irrational" reactions to
products.

I posted in an article about Google's data obsession that Google products
"have no soul." (And was downmodded!) This is an example of what I meant. They
are so data driven and engineering focused that I think it was inevitable we'd
see them release a product that consumers freak out about.

Putting your toe in the water and using data to iterate your way out of
problems works great for many of the problems we're trying to solve. But, this
problem, they decided, required a "big bang approach", since invite only won't
generate the network effects. So, you had to get it right on the first try.
For problems like this, you need a visionary decision maker with an
understanding of human beings and intuition as to how they will react to the
product. Someone who puts his or her foot down without being able to
necessarily justify why.

Google _hates_ intuition, since it's not data driven and is just an opinion.
Better to try it, measure it, and prove it. Most of the time, this doesn't
burn them. And in fact, it'd be impossible for Google to do what Google does
at the scale it does it without this philosophy being burned in deeply to the
culture. But this also makes it really, really hard for them to go into social
networking with a "big bang" as they tried here, since social networking is
largely about people, emotions, egos, and feelings and connecting users to
other users in a way that triggers the right responses and network effects. It
only partially falls back on data & algorithms to make things work well.
(Arguably, Facebook got the former part right first, and bolted on data-
obsession later, which is why they are winning this war.) Ie, it's not that
great of a situation if you have to machine-learn your way towards realizing
that someone's ex-husband doesn't belong on their friend list. You've then
burned the bridge and it's too late. Better to have someone with common sense
step in and avoid the fire.

So, I don't think this will be the first time we see Google have to backtrack
like this. It was the perfect storm for their major achillies heel to be
exposed, and I'm afraid there's not much they can do to correct the root
problem since it is a cultural viewpoint that would cause the other areas of
their business to suffer.

~~~
Retric
Wait _invite only won't generate the network effects_ why would you think
that? Facebook and other social networks have adopted the "all our info
belongs to us" method of propagation, but it's far from the only path to
networks effects. Most of the major social websites have have _blunders_ like
this, and while they discourage people like me from using them, the social
norms around privacy are changing.

~~~
gfodor
Yeah I retracted that slightly in my post, sorry if I stealth edited it later
than I should have -- I actually am not going to argue that the "big bang" was
necessary for Buzz's success, only that Google seems to have made that
decision.

------
acl
That was an impressively quick response for a large company.

~~~
dbz
It's really not surprising though, imho, because no one likes having decisions
made for them.

One of my teachers once told me what I thought and why I did things. I've
always hated my teacher since that time- not because he was completely wrong,
but because the principle of the action was disgusting. Google just decided we
(gmail users) wanted this.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I liked those features. I liked not having to click to follow people and be
automatically signed in with everything already configured. But I don't think
everyone else did. I think we have different viewpoints and enough people got
pissed off for them to change their policies.

~~~
pmjordan
People use services in very different ways, and have very different views on
what is acceptable privacy-wise. Personally, I struggle with the "all-in"
nature of Facebook (and Buzz, but there's no social pressure to use it yet) -
I have various social circles offline and online that simply don't overlap
(e.g. family, friends from school, friends from university, friends in the
various towns/countries I've lived, customers/business partners, etc.), and
the tone, topic and nature of communication with each group is different. I'm
not talking about "secrets", I just don't think it's appropriate for them to
be forcibly stirred into a pot, and people don't need to know about everything
without even trying to dig it up.

I even resent the public friends list on Facebook, but at least I get to
decide who lands there (unlike the initial Buzz rollout). As a result, I don't
use Facebook actively and just add people as friends because it's perceived to
be rude if I don't. I've noticed I'm not the only one - there seems to be a
pattern: someone discovers Facebook (note that it's only recently become
popular in Austria; it was practically unknown outside the web scene in 2008),
get excited and add all their friends, post pictures, etc. and after a while
remove a lot of personal details, delete photos and only participate actively
by replying to others. Maybe this has already played out a few years earlier
in the US.

Oddly enough, I really enjoy Twitter. I guess it's because it's very up-front
about _everything_ being public, so the temptation to post something you might
regret later is reduced.

------
jfager
The title is wrong. Buzz itself is not opt-in, auto-follow is, but not yet,
and not retroactively.

The blog post also glosses over something critical:

 _This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had
automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before
they created a profile._

But what about people who already had a Google profile, who _did_ have their
contacts automatically displayed to the world? Google still hasn't
acknowledged this or apologized for it, and they continue to act like everyone
who is complaining is getting upset over perceived rather than actual privacy
concerns.

~~~
carbon8
_"But what about people who already had a Google profile, who did have their
contacts automatically displayed to the world?"_

One of my accounts had a google profile, and nothing was displayed
automatically; it still required the exact same steps as the accounts without
a google profile, including the "How do you want to appear to others?" form
with the checkbox to display followers/following lists.

~~~
jfager
I've personally seen it happen with 3 separate accounts, including my own. I
don't know what we did different than you - we logged in to gmail, clicked 'no
thanks' on the Buzz pop-up, noticed it was turned on anyways, checked our
already existing public profiles, and saw a publicly available following and
followers list.

------
thecombjelly
I'm impressed they've been able to adapt it this much so quickly. Most large
software companies, at best, take weeks to make the changes that Google made.
It is also good to see them listening to the feedback, you don't always see
that either.

~~~
sasidharm
Well...it is the least they could do after their blatant disregard for the
privacy of its users!

------
dangrossman
Amazing how dramatically they've had to rework Buzz in just a few days. Google
will think twice about rolling anything out to millions of people at once from
now on.

~~~
thecombjelly
I actually think their approach was pretty good. You can't usually guess what
users want. The guys at Google probably thought, "yah people will really like
it to automatically link without any work". It's tough to gauge what the users
want until you put it in front of them. It may hurt sometimes at the
beginning, but if it leads to a better product in the long run then I would
say: keep it up.

~~~
restruct
No. It is unethical to risk user privacy and data just to benefit the company.

------
mbrubeck
_"We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very
sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to
improve things based on your feedback"_

Not the best possible apology (it's closer to "sorry _you_ were concerned"
than "sorry for _our_ mistakes"), but not shabby as these things go.

~~~
jasonlotito
From reading the article though, it was people's concern of things, not
Google's disregard for them. The changes basically amount to making things
easier to find. Even the Auto Following thing was controllable according to
the article.

So, as far as they are concerned, they didn't violate privacy as much as make
it easy for people to by-pass the privacy protections in place.

~~~
mbrubeck
Both of Google's posts on the issue talk about notification and controls for
users whose profile is created when they first use Buzz. But from my
experiments, if you were in the minority of users who had already set up a
Google profile (which I did in 2007 when they were first announced[1]) then
Google started broadcasting information about who you were following before
you even knew that you were following them.

Adding new privacy controls is not nearly sufficient to protect privacy; you
need to notify users about them and let them choose _before_ applying the
settings to their account. At least during the first launch (I haven't re-
tested with the latest changes), for my test account that already had a
profile, this was the experience:

(1) As soon as I logged into GMail and saw the Buzz welcome screen and clicked
"no thanks," my account began "following" people chosen by Google. (2) This
information was broadcast to a group of people chosen by Google. (3) I was not
informed that either of these things had happened. (4) New privacy settings
were added to my "Edit Profile" screen, but (5) the least-private setting was
activated automatically and I was not told yet that the new settings existed
until _after_ information about my email contacts was broadcast to other
users.

I don't think anyone disagrees that there were privacy controls. But it was
really a "beware of leopard" situation, at least for accounts in this
particular state. The only option for these users to preserve their privacy
was for them to (1) magically know that before logging into GMail today, they
must edit their profile to be non-public, and (2) magically know that new
privacy settings had been activated in their account so they could change them
before trying Buzz.

Now, I actually like Buzz and am still using it[2]. I think it's a much-needed
challenge to Facebook's closed platform. I can see how the Buzz team didn't
forsee just how bad this would be for a very small minority of users. But to
pretend that all users were given a chance to protect their privacy and just
didn't take it is really not true. Some users' privacy was violated the
instant they logged in, and giving them tools to help them clean up later (and
not telling them about the tools!) does not even remotely help.

[1]: [http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/15/google-starts-rolling-
out-c...](http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/15/google-starts-rolling-out-
centralized-profiles/)

[2]: <http://google.com/profiles/mbrubeck>

~~~
jasonlotito
You make some good points. I won't repeat, or argue, as I agree with most of
what you said. My main contention is that there was a lot of reactionaries
proclaiming things that simply weren't true and were making grand assumptions.
It made for an environment that was difficult to question. At some point, I
was told that readers of Hacker News essentially could not be wrong, and that
I was wrong for asking questions or disagreeing.

Thank you for providing more information. =)

------
artagnon
Most of the damage has already been done. They've lost on the initial buzz
that Buzz would have otherwise created. While I appreciate Google's swift
response, they made a fatal error during the rollout which will cost them
heavily in the long run.

~~~
buster
You mean in the short run. People will kind of forget this after the techblogs
and news sites see a more interesting story. Like now, I'm sure people are
still suffering very hard in Haiti but media coverage dropped a lot and i
don't see many people talking about it.

~~~
dagw
It has done long run damage to the Buzz product though. First thing my
girlfriend asked me when logging into her gmail account this morning was "how
do I turn off this Buzz thing". She didn't know what it was, only that there
was a lot of 'buzz' on the web about how you should turn it off. I have a hard
time imagining a scenario where all these people who've turned it off will
somehow change their mind and turn it back on.

------
olliesaunders
This title is written in past tense but from reading it I'm told what Google
is "going to" be doing.

------
waldrews
I was going to say "too little, too late" but it would be more accurate to say
"just enough, too late."

------
fossguy
Well, quick response because they realized they screwed it up...

------
mark_l_watson
Sorry if this is off topic, but: the speed that Google changed Buzz is the
reason why I love the web as a deployment platform. Except for local software
development tools, Latex, and video editing software, I want everything I do
to be web based.

------
rwhitman
This is nice to see, but in my mind, the damage has already been done. I felt
really violated by Buzz's rape of my Gmail account.

It will take a long time to heal those wounds

~~~
cgranade
I understand your concerns, but the use of the word rape is at best rather
loaded. One could make the argument that Google abused your data, but to
invoke a metaphor to extreme sexual violence dilutes your own point as well as
disrespects the very real victims of rape.

~~~
tyler
The word "rape" has multiple meanings. At least one of which applies and is
not necessarily connected with anything of a sexual nature.
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape>

~~~
cgranade
Yes, it does. The trouble is that the connotations of the word are still very
highly sexualized, even when using an explicitly non-sexual definition.

