I have been using Google Buzz for past 2 days now. Apart from what ever problems I am going to point out, I must say I am quite impressed with Buzz. After series of more or less failed efforts into social networking this time around Google has definitely cracked it. Google Buzz, as I said earlier is “friendfeed commenting + facebook status updates + twitter like following model + foursquare type Geo tagging, all rolled into your e-mail. It is dead simple to use and understand ( i was able to figure out every thing with in 5 minutes) The learning curve is very low. Google Buzz could be huge”. This said and done, I must say, this looks like an in complete product to me. It is turning out to be a lot more noisy than it initially looked.

First of all it doesn’t makes sense to follow highly influential people on Buzz because the 1st half of my Buzz stream is always and only crowded with their Buzzes (Note : This doesn’t happen in Facebook if I have joined their fan page). Even more irritating are the comments which gets integrated with the Buzzes. The problem here is unlike Facebook, Buzz doesn’t have a fixed number of comments that will be visible once there is an avalanche of comments in a particular Buzz. So, for example if some how 10 comments have come into a Buzz in last 5 minute then all of them will show up in your stream. The number of visible comments are time dependent rather than a fixed number. This is consuming a lot of unwanted space in my Buzz steam and it is very irritating when I have to keep scrolling down to find relevant text. Unfortunately there is just no way to fix the number of comments or hide all comments.

Buzz is filled with a lot of Privacy Flaws -

1). When you start using Buzz for the 1st time then by default the people who you are following and those you follow are made public and they are apparently those with whom you chat/E-Mail the most “PRIVATELY”. This was pointed just hours after the launch of Buzz by Silicon Alley Insider. What this basically means is – as soon as your Google Profile is public any one can get to know who all are in touch with you the most via Gmail. Interestingly there is post today titled “F**k you Google” by a lady whose ex-husband got to know about her boy friend because another privacy flaw in Reader.

2). The Vanity URL of your Google profile is your E-Mail Id itself. The other option is using the numbered vanity URL which means it becomes quite useless. This flaw can lead to a lot of targeted spamming and I seriously doubt Google has any solution for this except to ask people to choose their vanity URL again on a first come first serve basis.

3). @ Reply sometimes makes the E-Mail ID of the person you are replying to public. Basically if the E-Mail ID is not tagged to a name by Google (non Gmail IDs) and you type @ followed by the E-Mail ID then that E-Mail ID comes in your Buzz stream. This makes that E-Mail Id totally public. This privacy flaw was pointed out by TechCrunch yesterday.

All in all, I will again say Buzz is a great product (primarily because it is integrated with Gmail) but I might be using Buzz only to follow up with my friends. For other news and latest updates I will still login to my Twitter and Facebook.

My Google Profile

TechDusts Google Profile

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