Skip to main content

Shaken By Buzz


The Google Buzz nag screen's come up a few times the last couple of weeks and I was foolish to ignore it and proceed to my mailbox. Reading a very uncomplimentary article on this latest Google offering, prompted me to go check what it was all about. I was shocked to find that I was following some people and others were following me - that my chat status updates would be broadcast to pretty much anyone who had ever mailed me. To say I was outraged would be understating it.

Clearly, you have limited rights when you get a service for free but what Google has done here is beyond egregious. Most likely none of us knew what was happening to us. In a mad rush to get into the social media and buzz business, Google had prodded us against our will into sharing with each other what we may not want to. Apparently, they learned nothing from Facebook's recent experience with hijacking their user's right to privacy.

While a Gmail account is a personal email address, not all contacts are alike - J's dance teacher, a former co-worker, my neighbor, old friends, new acquaintances are very different from each other and I may not want to share things alike with all of them as Google has taken upon itself to do. I had to unfollow myself and block those who were following me just to get back to where we were before Buzz happened. Even after having done all that, I don't feel particularly safe as far as my privacy. What if they decide to sneak up and share other things without first giving me a choice to opt out.

Used to be that Google was about one thing - Search. Also used to be that they were not Evil. First there was Wave and now there is Buzz, a month later it will something else because there is the cool new thing that everyone's checking out and Google will want in on the action. The way things are, it is hard to decide what they want their users to do though the least they could do is to leave us alone.

While the landing page is still minimalist, the clutter, confusion and general lack of cohesion is not any different from Yahoo - it's just a couple of clicks away instead of being in your face. The result is no different - Google like Yahoo is losing focus and history is known to repeat itself. This reminds me of what a buddy who works for Microsoft told me once "Wait for a few years and Google bashing will become even more fashionable than Microsoft bashing".

Comments

Anonymous said…
NIce blog. I couldn't find follow me widget on your blog. Please put the same so that I can follow your blog.
Thanks.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques