When Google announced the launch of Google Buzz last week, the general reaction was “Oh no! Not another one!” Within days, millions of Gmail users were outraged with the way Buzz had stampeded upon people’s privacy. This angry piece is very direct and very instructive.

Google (GOOG) is finally making some changes to its new Buzz product in response to outrage about the product’s glaring privacy flaws.
But these changes don’t include the most obvious and important one: Making the whole thing opt-in and private by default.

As of now, Google’s algorithm just picks people out of your email box for you to follow and be followed by, regardless of whether they are friends, spouses, mistresses, stalkers, or enemies.

Worse, the list of your followers and followees is made public by default, so anyone can see it.

Put simply, Google just let the whole world peek into your email Inbox, without ever asking you if you wanted it to do that.

It’s pretty clear that Buzz is Google’s second desperate attempt to ram its way into the social media/networking largesse. The first was the disastrous Google Wave, which is already history. Between a week after its launch and now, the list of people on my contacts list (which btw is more than 300) who are online at any given time refuses to exceed 5.

And now, Buzz.

What’s visibly common between Wave and Buzz is the terrible amount of clutter on the interface. Too many things clamour for your attention at the same to the point that it can get a trifle overwhelming. This, from one of the first companies to make minimalist, intuitive, and usable interfaces. But both suffer from problems unqiue to them: the biggest trouble I faced using Google Wave: where or how do I get started? I mean, I knew it was an ultra-sophisticated, packed-with-features application but duh? With Buzz, the major irritant was the very Buzz link under Inbox.

Which brings us to a very common observation-cum-complaint millions of users have raised: Buzz is Google’s idea of competing with Twitter, unarguably the #1 social media platform today. The complaint though, is that Buzz is a rip off of Twitter sans the 140-character limit, and sans its respect for users’ privacy (this post brands Buzz as social manipulation).

Twitter achieved skyrocketing popularity with little or no effort on the part of the company that developed it while Buzz stormtrooped into our Gmail accounts, a “strategy” I call indecent. More directly, this is no different from the spammers who harvest email ids: Google simply imposed Buzz on its entire Gmail user base. And neither is Buzz stellar: it adds no value–integration with Twitter, Flickr, Picasa & tons of other popular social media sites is NOT value addition–and reflects what this piece terms as “engineering-focused mentality and arrogance.” Also, we can’t emphasize enough on the real privacy threats that Buzz brings with it: check this out for a pretty scary picture of what can go horribly wrong. And this.

In short, Google’s cluelessness in the social media space is starkly visible. And I’m not picking on Google: this cluelessness is fairly evident in every large technology corporation that’s dabbling in this space. But because Google is one of the so-in-your-face cash-rich companies aggressively pushing itself in social media and has so much to..er..”show,” I had to take it as an example.

If Google planned to replicate Gmail’s success: first, with the “invite-only” Wave accounts (seriously, who wants a Wave invite now?) and now with force-feeding us with Buzz, it has completely lost the plot. Here’s the thing: the social media “revolution (ugh!)” overtook the large corporations without their knowledge. It was too late when they woke up. To use a really ugly cliche, social media is about real people. It’s not a “product” or a business unit with a fancy acronym in a 50-billion dollar company. Twitter succeeded because of what’s known as “easy adoption.” People simply took to it. There’s really no mission or vision statement to platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The “missionary/visionary” kind of thinking happens in corporate boardrooms while real innovation happens when people are allowed to think independently: outside the confines of meeting rooms, which rarely happens in a large corporate set up. That or when people are passionate and desperate–when the concept/idea has the potential to wipe out their savings.

Good social media/networking platforms place control in the hands of real people. As someone who’s fairly active on Twitter, I’ve formed meaningful relationships with people I’ve never met in real life and probably won’t. Which is what a decent platform/tool should do: apart from the very basics–authentication, privacy, etc–it shouldn’t dictate what I must do. Google Buzz didn’t ask me if I was okay to view some dude who’s relentlessly spamming my Buzz timeline with his photography exploits. Or some kind lady who’s having a 40+ comments-heavy discussion about what to wear to her kids’ parents-teachers meet. Which also explains why people are outraged days after it was launched. And then there’s the whole “integrated approach,” which is immensely annoying– Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter… I don’t want friends of friends of friends of friends of someone on my Gmail contacts list to view my Flickr pictures. This kind of approach can partly be attributed to a linear, version-based, plugin-based approach to developing social media products. It’s like, “Okay, so we have Twitter and it’s already 2 years; let’s offer an upgrade, a Twitter 2.0.” The trouble is huge corporates, after some years are so thoroughly divorced from the actual users of their products that they have no idea what ticks (both on and off) people. Microsoft Word was an excellent Word processing tool when it debuted. Today, it’s a pseudo-publishing tool, a web page editor, a drawing/graphics application, XML editor, and a desktop blogging application.

In the end, as a perceptive friend (see postscript) observed, “social networks aren’t generic, they are about choice. Google is moving in the opposite direction.” Which is why giant, faceless corporations are still groping for that magic formula to garner the biggest slices of the social media pie for themselves. I’ll wind up by presenting a fairly common scenario. You’re stuck with a problem with your laptop and you call customer care. After you cross the robotic-IVR firewall and punch more buttons, you get a human voice with a name. A minute or so later, you know where it’s going: “according to our policies,” “please read the customer support agreement,” “someone will get in touch with you within 48 hours,” “I don’t have the authority to,” “we understand sir/ma’am, but…” “Oh! for that you must call…” And then you hang up. On a good social networking site, you simply post your issue/question. Real people will reply with astonishing speed, and they often have solutions to your problem.

This is where Google & co have lost the plot.

Postscript: Thanks to Stefanie (follow her: http://twitter.com/skarbach) for inspiring this post.

Tags: Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Innovation, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networking Tools, Technology, Tools, Twitter