Google Buzz - Really Google? Really?
 

1) Way to be too late and too redundant in the social network game. What, did you feel that Apple was cornering the "who the fvck cares?" ink with the iPad?

2) Privacy FAIL. this column sums it up fairly well...except it misses the fact that if you go in and uncheck the "Use my full name and make it searchable" box in your profile...you can then not use Buzz until you tell it that yes, it can use your full name. So there is no way to do it without attaching your full name to your posts and making it public. F-A-I-L. Way to make Facebook look like privacy geniuses.

Just shut it off then.

How?

Are you on it already? If not, don't opt in. You can also make your updates private.

I agree that it should be an opt-in rather than opt-out though.

Yes, it should be opt in rather than opt out. After playing with it for apx. 30 seconds, I've decided it's really stupid.

I don't know. When it popped up yesterday I clicked not now. It's in my options though and if I click on it it tells me I am following people.

If you do have it turned on, the article GD linked to does say how to turn it off (I have no idea if it is correct since I haven't played with it).

To answer the question, there is an itty-bitty link at the very bottom of gmail to "turn off buzz".

That's the only option. As I said, there is no way to make your updates private. If you uncheck the "make my full name searchable" box and then try to post something, it forces you to update your profile to make your full name searchable before you can post anything to buzz again. There is no way to make it private.

I turned it off. I'll just stick to FB. Don't Twitter much either... haven't twatted in awhile.
:D

Thanks!

It seems to be an interesting concept but I'm not ok with the lack of privacy and it's grabbing of and publishing random stuff. Especially since I use my email address for resume submission. I'll be willing to look at it again if they update/enhance the privacy options.

Gmail derail - I just started using my gmail more since my android doesn't like to synch with my yahoo email. In GMail if I say I want to always show photos from sender - all I get when I open any of their emails is boxes and the little teeny photo icon where any photos would be. It seems to do it with every sender I've said I want to see photos. Ideas?

Yes there is when you do them from Buzz. And you don't have to link any other sites to it if you don't want to. However, it does seem overly complicated and they should have done a better job of making it easy. They should have foreseen the hysteria from the Facebook example.

Oh, I see it now.

It's like they went out of their way to make this stuff completely unintuitive. I still can't find a link anywhere on gmail to the profile editing page, the only way I can get there is to use the direct link from the column I posted.

ETA: ah, found it. Setting [top of the page] -> Accounts and Import tab -> Google Account Settings -> Edit Profile. Super straight forward

I turned mine off after it started adding people I had no intention of following.