Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail & Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Google had decided to adjust one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail & chat contacts in Gmail. In lieu of automatically connecting people, Buzz will in the future merely suggest to new users a group of people they may need to follow or be followed by, they said.
Google moved quickly over the weekend to try to contain mounting criticism of Buzz, its social network, apologizing to users for features that were widely seen as endangering privacy & announcing product changes to address those concerns.
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Times Topics: Google Inc.
“We’re sorry for the concern we’ve caused & have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “We’ll continue to do so.”
Mr. Jackson, who said that the auto-follow feature had been intended to make it easy for people to get started on Buzz, acknowledged the criticism that was heaped on Google in the last few days.
Some critics said the latest modifications to Buzz, which is tightly coupled with Gmail, appeared to have addressed the most serious privacy concern.
The start-up technique for Buzz, which Google introduced on Tuesday as its answer to Facebook & Twitter, drew angry responses on technology blogs & beyond, as users feared that the names of their e-mail correspondents would be publicly exposed. A first set of changes that Google announced on Thursday failed to suppress the uproar.
“Turning off the auto-follow was a gigantic improvement,” Danny Sullivan, a longtime Google analyst & the editor of SearchEngineLand, said in an e-mail message.
But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said his organization still intended to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission this week pending its review of Google’s changes.
The privacy concerns about Buzz, & Google’s fast efforts to address its critics, echo episodes that have bedeviled other social networks, most notably Facebook. None of those events have slowed the growth of Facebook, which recently said it had reached over 400 million users. Gmail has 176 million users, according to the research firm comScore.
“Even with these changes, there is still the concern that Gmail users are being driven in to a social networking service that they didn’t sign up for,” Mr. Rotenberg said in an interview on Sunday.
The alter in the start-up technique for new users of Buzz was the most significant of a series of modifications that Mr. Jackson announced on Saturday.
“I think the privacy issues earlier this week with Buzz will blow over & not harm the product in the long term,” Mr. Sullivan said. But privacy will continue to haunt Google, they said, & plenty of people will point to the release of Buzz as an overreach by Google & a reason that the company could not be trusted.
Google also said that it would generate a new Buzz tab in Gmail’s settings page to permit users to hide Buzz from Gmail . The page gives users the option to disable Buzz, deleting their posts & removing their Google profile, which in plenty of cases listed publicly their circle of contacts in Buzz. The new feature could address concerns that disabling Buzz & removing a public profile was a multistep technique that confused plenty of users & that some described as a game of whack-a-mole.
Google also will no longer automatically connect public Picasa albums & items shared on Google Reader, another feature that had been widely criticized by some users & privacy advocates.
The changes Google announced on Saturday will be carried out in the next few days.
In the next one weeks, existing Buzz users will be directed to the new start-up technique to give them a “second chance to review & confirm” the people they are following, Mr. Jackson said.
While it is early to gauge Buzz’s success, Google said tens of millions of people had tried the service in its first 48 hours.
Mr. Sullivan of SearchEngineLand said that the level of activity on Buzz appeared to be significant.
“I suspect Google might have a minor hit on its hands already,” they said.
