Saturday, May 08, 2010

Buzz update: still floundering

The default Buzz behavior is to make all posts public and viewable by your Google Profile (here's mine). Google Profiles are trivially discoverable by design, this is one heck of a problem.

Google has been stubbornly obtuse about this. It's the corporate Asperger's syndrome.

Even though I haven't heard of a fix, it's been long enough to be worth a restest. As of today I found:
  1. Within Gmail, if you set the scope of a Buzz update to a contacts group, that will be the default for you next post. Only members of the authorized groups will see Buzz posts on your Google profile. There is, however, no way to scope profile visibility to one's "followers".
  2. If you use the email feature to send a Buzz to buzz@gmail.com it will be public and it will appear in your Google profile for any visitor. Your last used scope setting is ignored. There does not appear to be a "group" equivalent to "everyone who I have allowed to follow me on Google Reader".
  3. There doesn't appear to be a Google (official) share in Buzz bookmarklet so I couldn't test that behavior.
  4. There's still no Google Reader/Buzz integration story.
In other words, very little has changed, Buzz is still not a plausible Facebook alternative. Google deserves whatever FTC hassles it might get.

See also:
--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

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