14 DAY TRIAL // Google Buzz hasn't seen the smoothest of launches, but the company isn't leaving anything to chance and has now made some significant changes to the service for the second time in four days. The changes address some of the biggest problems people had with Buzz, the privacy concerns and better control over the service. There are two main changes and a new feature in this latest update but also a couple of small tweaks.
The biggest move is dropping the auto-follow feature which was one of the most touted at launch. Google then said that it would save you time and hassle by connecting you to your friends automatically based on the people you chat and email with the most. Turns out, people don't only chat and email with their friends, a lot of people use Gmail for work and email a lot with people they wouldn't want to see what they share on Buzz. For some reason, this never really occurred to the Google folks and they're now frantically moving to change to an auto-suggest model.
"[W]e wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn't have to manually peck out your social network from scratch. However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people," Todd Jackson, product manager Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote.
"[S]tarting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked 'Follow selected people and start using Buzz'," he added. New users will now get a page of suggested connections, but they can choose who gets into the Buzz list and who doesn't. Existing users will also be prompted to review the list and remove anyone they want to.
Google Buzz will also not automatically connect your Picasa albums and Reader shared items to your account as it did initially. Buzz enables you to add a number of sites and services to draw content from and it did this automatically for the two Google services. It only did it for the items already public, but there were still some concerns so Google is now leaving it to the users to decide if they want to add them or not.
Finally, Buzz gets a settings page in Gmail an obvious move since Google decided to integrate its new social product with the popular email service. The settings were previously only available from Google Profiles. From the new settings tab users will be able to remove Buzz from Gmail, they can also do it from a link at the bottom of Gmail, or even disable it completely.
It's been a busy first week for Buzz and things may continue to go at this pace for a while now, but Google seems determined to get this one right after so many failed attempts at building a social service. "We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so," Jackson concluded.
