14 DAY TRIAL // Google Buzz has certainly stood in the center of attention since it launched less than a week ago and most of the time, not for the best of reasons. Still, Google has managed to keep things under control thanks, in part, to an ad-hoc "war room" created to handle the issues and problems that have become clear now that the product was made available to such a large number of people.
Google Product Manager Todd Jackson, who has been keeping a tight grip on the strong, and mostly negative, feedback the company has been getting from its users, managed to find a few free moments on Monday to talk about future plans for Buzz and about the frantic week the product has had in its first few days. Unsurprisingly, one of the things he emphasized is that there are plenty of changes coming to the social networking product and soon, on top of the ones already announced.
Buzz's launch last week came as a complete surprise for most people which turned out to be a bad idea. The product was clearly not ready for a mainstream audience despite having been in testing internally for several months. It's now obvious that Google's own employees weren't enough to predict the issues that have risen after it was made public.
Google has now twice made adjustments to how Buzz works, at times radically changing its initial approach, and the changes have already been implemented or are coming this week. One of the biggest was the decision to drop the auto-follow model for an auto-suggest one aimed at calming some of the, well founded, worries many users had. The decision was made on Saturday, in the previously mentioned war room, by several high-ranking Google execs and engineers with the announcement coming later that day. Software engineers are now coding the changes and it should be coming for new users this week.
Another issue which has popped up and which Google plans to fix is the fact that the algorithm tends to favor those who post often or get a lot of comments, not always a measure for relevancy. Another feature which should make some people happy is the possibility to filter out or block altogether the conversations they don't want to get in their Buzz inbox. If Buzz will turn out a success or is another failure on the social front for Google remains to be seen, but the company says there are tens of millions of people who have tried Buzz already so the stakes are high. As a sidenote, tens of millions of people trying out Buzz because it showed up in their Gmail accounts isn't the same as tens of millions of people actually using Buzz.