

Anger Leads to Apology From Google About Buzz - cwan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/technology/internet/15google.html

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elblanco
_sigh_ Google, please test this stuff out with non-Googlers first. We
understand that you haven't learned yet about how social media works, after
several tries...but we like your ideas anyway. Just let the unwashed masses
sanity check your stuff first before you roll it out to everybody and their
mom.

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amix
"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

This Buzz stunt should haunt Google forever as we clearly can't trust them on
"do no evil". This is a at least the sentiment I still have from this Buzz
privacy scandal.

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anatoly
The unofficial Google motto is "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". It's a
subtle, yet important, difference.

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dkersten
The other _subtle, yet important, difference_ is that its an _unofficial_
motto. Everyone assumes its Googles official stance on everything, yet they
never said that[1], so really, they can be as evil as they want without going
against anything they've ever stated. Quite clever of them, really, to make
everyone assume that this is their official motto, when they can later turn
around and say,w ith a straight face, _no, we never claimed that_.

[1] Please correct me if I'm wrong. I searched but found no evidence saying
otherwise. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil> doesn't really say
that its their motto either, but does certainly suggest that Google has been
riding the _Don't be Evil_ publicity.

~~~
anatoly
Think about it. What would be the hypothetical benefit? Being able to say "Hi,
yes, we're being evil, but it's OK because we never officially promised
otherwise"? Do you think such a statement heralds a clear PR win for any
company?

Disclaimer: I work at Google. My opinions are my own.

~~~
dkersten
Of course I don't think they'll do that, _but_ if they've already messed up PR
for some reason, due to being evil, at least they can brush it off (at least a
little) on having never claimed that they weren't going to be evil. If it
comes to that, they're probably already screwed, but at least they have a
counter argument against the _you promised you wouldn't be evil_ crowd.

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blahedo
So they're sorry for the "concern", but not the action? Can they really not
understand what was the problem with what they did?

It does look as if they've addressed several major concerns, but they're still
bulling on ahead. And it's kind of ballsy after all of that to say that "tens
of millions of people had tried the service in its first 48 hours" when
"trying the service" appears to have been an unavoidable consequence of
checking one's gmail, at least during that window of time.

~~~
mh_
-nod- sorry for the concern caused is a huge distance from "we are sorry that we chose viral over virtuous". I can't believe that GOOG top level management (who must be using Gmail as dogfooding), would have been comfortable with their top contacts being shared. Would have made for interesting viewing in light of possible deals and aquisitions..

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fnid2
Yeah, how about all GOOG employees release exactly the same information on
themselves that they released on others without _their_ permission. That'll
show they are sorry.

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trevelyan
>> how about all GOOG employees release exactly the same information on
themselves that they released on others without their permission.

If they use Gmail, didn't they?

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fnid2
I dunno, maybe they all opted out during the dogfooding.

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suprgeek
Google engineers need to understand that in the Real World, Frequent Past
E-mails do not relate to "Most Likely to Follow". It seems like this was more
of a purely technology centric solution to a human interaction identification
problem without taking the "human" part into consideration. Truly scary
stuff...

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Nogwater
Maybe I'm an unusual case, but their picks were pretty good for me. Out of my
few hundred contacts, it correctly chose a good top 10 that I would want to
follow. Maybe my chat history helped out on that. That being said, they
screwed up with the auto-subscribe instead of auto-suggest.

