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Gmail Buzz: Mixing Real Life And Your Preferred Discussion Group In All the Wrong Ways?  (View post)

Alan [PersonRank 0]

Thursday, February 11, 2010
14 years ago7,467 views

Maybe they should grow up a bit, in maturity. "wouldn't use this service because my mum might see it"? This is the case anywhere public on the internet.

Alan in Montreal [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I'm getting a bit fed-up with Gmail being hijacked by this. I want an email system in Gmail. When I want to engage in social networking, I already use Facebook.

Users need to be able to remove the entire "Buzz" module from Gmail.

I really love the way Google has integrated many of its services. I'm an iPhone users and am very happy with how I can sync my various services across several platforms. But this Buzz nonsense has me a bit worried for my privacy, and I am strongly considering a move to Yahoo email now, because of this.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

> This is the case anywhere public on the internet.

Yes, theoretically the teen's mum could also show up on the teen's favorite club, because that club is public and so on. Similarly the teens mum may show up on MySpace (which may indeed be when the teen moves on to another site). But the difference is that Google, by default, will *push* the family members together into one group along with others. I.e. if the family member does nothing but successively hit the biggest "okay" buttons next time they login to Gmail – and hitting these buttons is something very different from going out and discovering a new site on your own, based on your interests – then they will automatically have subscribed to other family members (provided those were in the suggestion list).

WebSonic.nl [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

You can remove the Buzz label. In the Footer there is a link "turn off buzz"

Daniel [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I don't really understand the critique – can't you create groups of people ("Family", "Friends", "Work", "People I want to share embarrassing things with") and post only to those people?

Stefano [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

[put at-character here]WebSonic.nl, Yes you can do it, but if you use the sharing system of google reader, buzz will reappear in your profile page with your full name visible to all although you have limited it only to your friends...

IMHO google has not tested in-depth integration with all its services ... Buzz is too invasive...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Daniel...
[cross-posted the following]

I want the conversation to be very open for people who want to discover it, but I don't want people to be pushed towards it simply because I email with them. The difference is in topic and jargon used, not so much in terms of secrets. For instance, I now connected Blogoscoped.com to my buzzstream but that doesn't mean my family is interested in the blog posts there – however, by pushing it towards a private group only in the buzz feeds connection settings, I would stop people who might in fact BE interested in it from seeing it here. Or can this issue be solved here? I'm certainly no Buzz expert.

> IMHO google has not tested in-depth integration with
> all its services ... Buzz is too invasive...

I wonder if some of the issues with Buzz weren't tested because Google wasn't able to test them... the problem of mixing "topic" groups is not really a problem if you're only testing this internally within Google Inc... because your family members and any other of your groups outside your "work life" as a Google employee will not have Buzz yet (as it's still a secret feature only for Google employees, presumably). As they don't have Buzz, you're only within 1 topic group, namely (mostly tech-oriented I guess) co-workers...

Sam Davyson [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

[Cross posted from Buzz]

You are right Philipp this is an issue. Kyle's suggestion does help with some use cases but only really private ones. So you can create different contact groups for family and friends and work colleagues and whoever... but anything the things that you make public will still be going to everyone who follows you even if you know that they won't be interested. The solution would be having granularity in the following process. So you could set up various public streams – e.g. general, tech, local etc. Then people can choose to follow only particular facets of your public output.

Another way round which would perhaps make more sense is that there could be an option to only follow non-public stuff from someone. So anything I'm saying to my family I'm unlikely to be saying in public. This allows each post to be individually tailored for people (you can choose from your contacts) and you don't have to worry about people seeing a lot of public stuff that they won't be interested in.

A further problem is that any exterior feeds don't have full privacy settings... it's just one setting for the full feed – not on a post by post basis

mbegin [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

>> I.e. if the family member does nothing but successively hit the
>> biggest "okay" buttons next time they login to Gmail...

Buzz is automatically enabled in your Gmail account whether you click that button or not.

See here: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/167280.html#id167472

Keith Chan [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

[put at-character here]Philipp

Typo: [last paragraph] It’s still *too* early for me to tell if above-mentioned is high enough a usage barrier to render Buzz useless ...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

[Thanks Keith, fixed "to" -> "too"]

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

> Buzz is automatically enabled in your Gmail account
> whether you click that button or not.

Hmm, when I saw that page I remember next to a big blue "Yes [?]" button there was a very small link along the lines of "no take me to my inbox" or something. I don't remember what either button actually read. Will the small link not disable Buzz in your Gmail account when you click it?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

[Update: Added a comment from Lifehacker to the post.]

Canna [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

There is a "turn off buzz" link at the bottom of gmail. There is also an option to make Buzz private instead of public, and to share certain streams with certain people.

I find the auto-following of people a great strength of Buzz. It leverages your existing gmail network so that people don't have to go out of their way to create an account to gain access to the information you share. I've been an avid user of Google Reader, and I have only been sharing items with a few friends who also use Google Reader--but now it's linked to Buzz all my [gmail-using] friends can see the amazing stuff I find on the tubes :D

Not being interested in what someone shares is not a problem... Just don't follow them. Being interested in *half* of what someone shares is more complicated.

They should implement a filtering system so that you can get your Buzz feed to show you things you're interested in. I was actually thinking of running some of my Google Reader RSS feeds through a Yahoo Pipe, but then it sounded like too much work. It would be awesome if they had a built-in filtering system.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

> There is a "turn off buzz" link at the bottom of gmail.

I'm wondering, if you turn off Buzz, will people still be able to subscribe to you, and will different groups of contacts of yours be able to discover each other per your Buzz profile "who's following you" list? (Provided your profile was public before, and you didn't change anything.)

mbegin [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

>> Will the small link not disable Buzz in your Gmail account when you click it?

No. It will just bring you to your "Inbox" instead of your "Buzz box" Buzz is enabled by default. The only way to turn it off is manually at the bottom of your Gmail.

Here's an image of the page:
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/5554/40649920.png

And if you're logged into Gmail you can view-source: of this page in your browsers address bar to see the source code for that page: https://mail.google.com/mail/buzz/intro.html

mbegin [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

>> I'm wondering, if you turn off Buzz, will people still be able to subscribe to you, and will different groups of contacts of yours be able to discover each other per your Buzz profile "who's following you" list? (Provided your profile was public before, and you didn't change anything.)

If you turn off Buzz, I think it will remove all your Buzz posts/comments and remove you from peoples "following" lists... but the help is unclear: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=171460

Sam Davyson [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

If you turn off buzz in your Gmail account it doesn't change anything. All your posts stay on your profile and you can still comment on things via the profile.

It's literally only turning it off within Gmail.

Nick Steffen [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

I'd like to see more labels. If we could organize our contacts by labels and then be able to attach labels to each individual buzz, the system would know to only 'send' the buzz to contacts with that label. This would be a quick way to both organize them and control who sees them.

The advantage to using labels like this is that we could attach more than one label to a given buzz or more than one label to a given contact (eg my brother might want to see my buzzes on sports as well as those that are family related).

Maybe that would help.

fdavila [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

"I've been an avid user of Google Reader, and I have only been sharing items with a few friends who also use Google Reader--but now it's linked to Buzz all my [gmail-using] friends can see the amazing stuff I find on the tubes :D"

This seems interesting to me too. Very few people I know use google reader, but many use gmail.
And in Philipp's case... i use reader to follow this blog so, following him on Buzz (if he's importing from here) would mean duplicate information. I'm already using hide on reader to avoid that in some cases, but it seems it will take some time for us to find a proper way to use these stuff together.

On another note, the maps interface where you can go anywhere and see people's public posts looks really interesting too, even if it is mostly 'testing buzz' for now. I've already used it (not intentionaly) to find out the reason of a road blockade near my home and i guess many more uses will come of it.

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