Google Admits to Mistakes in Releasing Buzz
Thursday, February 18th, 2010On a previous post I commented on how to disable Google’s Buzz in gmail. I was very annoyed at how Google introduced this “feature” to gmail users (felt more like shoved it down gmail user throat’s) with so many privacy issues and horror stories coming out of this.
In a BBC article Google product manager in charge of Buzz admitted to mistakes and apologized to users. You can read all about how they bypassed normal procedure which is blaming the process instead of the real people who made the decision to bypass procedure. This was a major product release and was not a simple decision to bypass but rather a calculated decision by management. And they say that the algorithm picked people you converse with the most but I was automatically forced to follow people I had one or two correspondence with on a mailbox I’ve had since 2004.
The biggest gripe I have though is that they forced this feature on gmail users who may or may not be interested in it. I love gmail and use it as my primary email address mainly because it reduces spam and noise so much better than other email services. Here comes a tool to add on top of a great anti spam technology that adds a sort of “friend spamming” to gmail. I was definitely not interested in it and think it would have been better off if they just launched it as a different service. Apparently they thought of this too:
Another idea, said Mr Jackson, was to create a separate service that was not part of Gmail.
“We think that integration with Gmail was absolutely the right way to go - we wanted to make Buzz easily accessible to people,” he said.
That is very wrong Mr. Jackson, launching this within gmail was the absolute wrong thing to do which is why there’s so much backlash on this issue. If this were a service launched on it’s own that people would register for (like many of the other services google provides) then you would not be apologizing in a BBC article.
The only reason they would launch this within gmail would be to boost membership in the Buzz program as fast as possible. Which seems to have been their goal because of how deceptive their whole opt in process was. I had a message in my gmail header about the service, I thought I was clicking OK to just get rid of this annoying message because I didn’t really want to read it. Instead I had clicked to opt-in. Yes, it is my mistake for not reading the full message but it still stinks of deception because they know many people won’t read.
If google releases even a useless service, just the fact that they are releasing it generates enough interest in the media that they get publicity and hoards of users registering to try it out. They didn’t need to do this, or maybe they did. Typing “failure of goo” in google search brings up the most popular suggestion of “failure of google wave” as the search term, which itself returns 3,860,000 results. Maybe they were afraid of Buzz turning out to be another failure and forcing it on gmail users would be the best way to make it a success.
