Whats the BUZZ with GOOGLE!

GOOD MORNING FLINT!
2/12/10
BY Terry Bankert

BANKERT ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

WHATS THE BUZZ WITH GOOGLE http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html

COME ON IN THE WATERS FINE!

4:26 am 02/13/2010 I joined the BUZZ
4:33 I figured how to get to it Google the word BUZZ The Page says
-No setup needed Automatically follow the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.
-Share publicly or privately Publish your ideas to the world or just to your closest friends
-Inbox integration Comments get sent right to your inbox so it's easy to keep the conversation going.
-Photo friendly See thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites. -Connect sites you already use Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader
-See updates in real time New posts and comments pop in as they happen. No refresh required. -Just the good stuff Buzz recommends interesting posts and weeds out ones you're likely to skip. 4:38 I am in my email account , which I seldom check, and find one person is following me!
4:39 It tells me I have to set up a profile before I can continue.Your profile includes your name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you.
4:43 I go to “Find People to Follow”
4:44 I go to see connected sites
4:54 I am in now its like watching water boil.
5:06 I am in and it looks cool. Like twitter on your email page.

So whats the big deal?

THE BIG DEAL!!!!!!

Note format the headlines are mine and some comment. Read the links and draw your own conclusion.

IS THERE PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET? GOOGLE "BUZZ GATE" SHOWS THERE IS NOT. When Google introduced BUZZ -its answer to Facebook and twitter-it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.[1] The Internet giant has tweaked the sign-up process to make the opt-out option clearer and made it easier to block people from following users.[5]

UGLY COMMERCIAL GREED RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD Google took the information from your email cache and appied it to its commercial objective of launching BUZZ.[trb] The Internet giant this week added a service to Gmail that allows millions of its users to share updates, photos, videos and more with people they e-mail and chat with the most. But users soon discovered that unless they changed their privacy settings, Buzz publicly shares their contacts.[5]

GOOGLE SAYS, WE DO NOT CARE! Google on Friday denied that it planned to remove its Buzz social networking program from Gmail, but said it is considering a standalone version. "No, we're not planning to remove Buzz from Gmail," a Google spokeswoman said via email.[4]

WHAT IS THE BUZZ Buzz works as a generic "here's what I'm doing" feed, where you can post text, links or multimedia. Posting a photo can be done by either uploading the image directly from the browser or pointing at a file in your Picasa account. If you post a link with a URL in it into your feed -- either by pasting the URL right in the text box or by clicking "Insert Link" to add it -- Buzz automatically detects it and attempts to pull pictures from the linked page, which you can then include for context. (It's similar to Facebook in that respect, but works a bit better.)[3] People can choose to follow you, or you can choose to follow them, by adding names from their/your Google contact list or from a public Google profile. Unlike Facebook, where people who want to "friend" you can't follow your feeds unless you "friend" them back first, people can follow your Buzz feeds immediately, although you are notified when that happens and can then choose to "unfollow" them at any time.[3] You can also post to the general public -- making Buzz a bit like Twitter, insofar as anybody with an account can see your post. (This ties into the mobile version, which interacts with Google Maps so that Buzz users can view public messages depending on their location and the location of the person who sent the post.)[3]

THE GOOD The most genuinely useful part about Buzz is how it works as an activity aggregator. Anything you post on YouTube, Google Chat, Flickr, Twitter or Picasa can be automatically funneled into Buzz. If you manage sites through your Google account's [3]

GOOGLE CRUMBLING UNDER THE INTERNET FIRESTORM For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.[1]

THE BAD....... I KNOW YOUR DARK LITTLE INTERNET SECRETS Did you know that in E-mail, it turns out, ther is a treasure trove of your many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. [1]
SOME IMPLY ITS NO BIG DEAL At the moment, only the e-mail's image and subject heading will show up in the buzz. Anything you put in the main e-mail field will not.[2] Buzz is a mixed bag -- a combination of good ideas and bad implementation -- and it needs more refinement before it can be a serious contender in the world of Twitter and Facebook.[3]

THE UGLY...... TWEETS HAVE LITTLE TO SHOW WHEN THEY FLASH, GOOGLE WILL EXPOSE YOUR FAMILY JEWELS While Twitter users adore broadcasting their follower counts to the world, Buzz users have plenty of good reasons to keep such information private--particularly since in Buzz, the following/follower lists are not attached just to a cryptic pseudonym but to publicly viewable account names complete with a first name, a last name, and in many cases an e-mail address and links to Picasa and Blogger accounts[2] (The self serving great minds at ) Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy.”[1]

FREEDOM FIGHTERS WILL DIE IN CHINA AND IRAN BECAUSE OF GOOGLE "BUZZ GATE". As Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government."[1]

GOOGLE , JUST ANOTHER CORPORATION THAT WILL STOMP ON YOUR PRIVACY! Mr. Morozov is a researcher on the impact of the Internet on totalitarian regimes at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University under a fellowship financed by Yahoo. In an interview, he said the flap over Buzz “definitely undermines Google’s credibility when it talks about freedom of expression.” [1]

GOOGLE RESPONDS BY SAYING THEY ARE REALLY GOOD PEOPLE In an e-mail message, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, said, “Google remains completely committed to freedom of expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of protecting both.”[1]

GOOGLE BLOWS IT Mr. Jackson defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience to users and that many liked that feature. He said that it was very easy for users to edit who they were following on the service and who could follow them.[1]

WITH GOOGLE YOU CANNOT ASSUME PRIVACY. He also said that anyone could hide their list of Buzz contacts with a single click.[1]

RESOLUTION, JUST DO NOT PUT ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT WOULD EMBARRASS YOU IF YOU PUT IT ON A HIGHWAY BILL BOARD IN YOUR HOME TOWN,OVER YOUR HOME , FOREVER. After numerous bloggers complained that the privacy controls were difficult to find and adjust, Google agreed to make changes. In a blog post Thursday night Mr. Jackson wrote that the company had made it easier for people to hide their Buzz contacts and block followers whose identity was unknown.[1]

NOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN VIOLATED GOOGLE PROMISES TRANSPARENCY? SO ....THE SOLUTION IS A REAPPLICATION OF THE PROBLEM. “It is still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”[1]

GOOGLE DECREES THAT MOST LIKE IT ...SO WHATS THE PROBLEM? Mr. Jackson said Buzz had proved popular, with tens of millions of people trying it in the last two days.[1] MIS GUIDED GOOGLE But some critics said that Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat correspondence as the basis of a social network was fundamentally misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically created from e-mail conversations.[1]

GOOGLE DECIDES TO TAKE YOUR GMAIL ADDRESS BOOK AND SHOW IT TO THE WORLD. HAVE YOU EVER TALK TO A PORN QUEEN ? NOW YOUR GANDMOTHER KNOWS. “People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”[1]

EMAIL IS NO LONGER PRIVATE WITH GOOGLE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION COMPLAINT COMING “UNFAIR AND DECEPTIVE PRACTICES". WORK FOR THE BROTHERHOOD! Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.[1]

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE VICTEM TRAMPLED AGAIN IN GOOGLE "BUZZ GATE". In an expletive-laden article that was widely cited on the Web, a blogger who writes about issues related to violence against women complained that Google had made her fearful. She said that she had unexpectedly discovered a list of people, which may have included her abusive ex-husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, following her and her comments on Google Reader, a service for reading blogs and automated news feeds. [1]

PRIVACY VIOLATED CAUSING FEAR OF PHYSICAL HARM “My privacy concerns are not trite,” wrote the blogger, who uses the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs. “They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up.”[1] In a further effort to contain the fallout, Google reached out to her and made changes to enhance the privacy of shared comments on Google Reader. [1]

GOOGLES "TURN ON "CANNOT BE THWARTED Some privacy experts said that Google had made matters worse by making it difficult for people to hide their lists of Buzz contacts after they realized that those lists had been made public. Some users assumed that they could simply turn off the Buzz service, but that proved inadequate. [1]

LETS PLAY WHACK A GOOGLE “You want to have a simple rollback mechanism, so once things are not what you expected them to be, you can get out quickly and not have to play a game of Whack-a-Mole,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert and assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] Google said it was planning to address that issue soon. [1]

GOOGLE MANAGEMENTTHEORY " READY SHOOT AIM". YOUR LOSS OF PRIVACY IS JUST COLLATERAL DAMAGE! Google is known for releasing new products before they are fully ready and then improving them over time. But its decision to do so with Buzz, coupled with its introduction to all 176 million Gmail users by default, appears to have backfired. [1]

GOOGLE ON TOP TEN TERRIBLE CORPORATE ACTS LIST. “It was a terrible mistake,” said Danny Sullivan, a specialist on Google and editor of SearchEngineLand, an industry blog. “I don’t think people expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with. And if there was a way to opt out, it was really easy to miss.”[1]

Posted here by Terry Bankert http://www.flintfamilylaw.com/
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html
[2] http://www.pcworld.com/article/189249/how_to_use_google_buzz.html
[3] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/02/12/urnidgns852573C400693880002576C8006AF22C.DTL
[4] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359148,00.asp
[5] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-privacy13-2010feb13,0,4641653.story
[6] http://www.google.com/buzz/help/privacy.html
Flint Talk http://flinttalk.com/viewtopic.php?p=52869#52869

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