Google Mulls Further Changes to Buzz
After taking steps to stem the public backlash against its social-networking service Buzz, Google Inc. is planning further updates and considering changing how it tests new Buzz features.
Google product manager Todd Jackson said in an interview Monday that the number of people initially uncomfortable with the service underscored that the company’s approach of testing Buzz among its employees hasn’t been sufficient.
“Getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” Mr. Jackson said. “We needed to launch to the public and get feedback from users.”
Mr. Jackson said Google might test new features with friends and family of Google employees. Further refinements, including features that help people filter what postings they see and block certain conversations, are also in the works, he noted.
His remarks came days after Google announced a major concession to people who have raised concerns that Buzz didn’t do enough to protect their privacy. Google launched Buzz last Tuesday, when it introduced it as a tool for keeping track of all the social activity happening across Google and other sites. The service, which is integrated with Gmail, allows users to share postings with friends and to view and comment on items their friends share, making it a potential rival to Facebook Inc.
Since then, Google has said it would no longer automatically subscribe users to follow the postings of their close Gmail contacts, a move that had spooked many people into believing Buzz was publicizing their private relationships. Instead, after reviewing users’ Gmail contacts, it would only suggest people that users should follow but leave whether to do so up to them.
The company has also announced steps to make it easier to disable Buzz altogether and said that it would no longer connect Buzz to Picasa photo albums and Google Reader items automatically.
Mr. Jackson said the decision to abandon the old model was made Saturday by a group of engineers and executives, including Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz and its senior vice president of engineering, Jeff Huber, who have been assembled in a Buzz “war room” at Google for weeks. The group weighed feedback from users and Google employees, to whom it presented at a previously scheduled companywide meeting on Friday, he said. Engineers began coding the new feature Saturday and plan to launch it to new Buzz users this week.
“We are treating this as a code red in the Gmail release process,” Mr. Jackson said.
Google says tens of millions of people have begun using Buzz. But some users are still weighing what to make of Google’s latest foray into social networking—while digesting the meaning of the latest changes.
Andrew Goldstein, a 44-year-old criminal-defense attorney from Haverhill, Mass., said he was “really heartened” that Google moved to the new model, which addressed his concerns that the service forced him to combine his personal and professional life. “They have almost gone 180 degrees in a number of days,” he said of the changes.
But he said that his initial concerns about the product caused him to “button down everything,” and only start to share postings with a small number of people. “I’m not quite sure what we’re going to be left with,” he said. “I want to like Buzz and I want to use it. But it’s hard to say because it’s so new and it’s changing so quickly.”
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