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

So ladies and gentlemen, presenting Twexicon.

TWEXICON

1. Twitter (N): Online Micro blogging service to send and view second-by-second status updates, almost instantaneous updates from the entire Connected World.
2. Tweet [pronounced Tw-E-t] (N): A Twitter Message; (v) to send a Twitter message
3. Tweeter (N): A person who tweets, a Twitter user.
4. Tweeting (N): The act of sending a Tweet or Twitter message
5. Tweeple (N): People on Twitter
6. Follow (V): To follow someone’s updates on Twitter
7. Unfollow (V): To stop following someone’s updates on Twitter
8. Twiddle (V): To fiddle with Twitter; no SOP exists but activities range from banging your head trying to think of an intelligent message to Tweet (as opposed to “Gawd, I’m late to work!” or “My cat is puking”), or trying to decide whether to delete your Twitter account or no. Twiddling is limited only by your imagination.
9. Twiverse/Twpoem (N, V): Verses limited to 140 characters or less, the act of writing such verses.
10. Twoiletry (N): Your Twitter-enabled device that lets you Tweet from the loo.
11. Twral (V): To bait someone on Twitter.
12. Twralling (N): The act of baiting someone on Twitter.
13. Tweetus Interruptus (N): Act of interrupting somebody when he/she is in the middle of typing a Tweet.
14. Premature Twijaculation (N): Tweet incomplete because the Tweeter ran out of the alloted 140 characters.
15. Twit (N): Witty Tweet

Leave a comment and I’ll update Twexicon.

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Microblogging, Microblogs, Technology, Tweet, Twexicon, Twitter, Twitter Dictionary

In my experience, Agile worked great for the developers and QA/testing folks but not as well for the UX and documentation folks. The primary reason was the constant flux in what emerged when an iteration ended. For example, if feature A was completed at the end of iteration 3, I’d document it the way it was looked (the user interface) and worked. However, in the planning meeting for iteration 4, somebody would point out that some UI element for feature A needed to change. Now I had to redo the documentation for the same feature in iteration 4. Additionally, in the same planning meeting, somebody else realized that a feature already completed in iteration 2 needed an enhancement. They’d put that as a task in iteration 4. I now had two repeat tasks. Add to this, every iteration typically had documentation reviews by these cross functional teams. Now, because each iteration typically lasted for 3 weeks at the maximum, the review task would be deferred to the next iteration. This meant I couldn’t mark my writing task as complete for the iteration although from a purely writing/authoring perspective, it was, indeed, complete. The resultant confusion for the writers bordered on chaos simply because it was too hard to keep track of what was going where. Kris explains this quite nicely:

I think when it comes to restructuring the workflow of a product to make it significantly better, executives need to understand there is a time for Agile, and a time to redesign, and redesign efforts take more in the range of 2-6 months to complete, in my experience. It all depends on how much is “surface” redesign, such as moving things around on the pages and creating a nicer look and feel vs. how much the deeper code has to be modified because features need to work completely differently than the developers designed them.

And nails it accurately here:

Do we need the internal motivation of a release every 4-6 weeks to make things happen? Customers don’t necessarily demand a release once a month, they just need bugs fixed and problematic features redesigned so they can perform their tasks better…Why do we have to release something once a month?

In other words, efforts to “quicken” the time to market shouldn’t compromise the “big picture” of the product. Ultimately, any product is the sum of its parts. The efforts should, really stay focussed on incrementally improving the product–in an Agile mode or no–than on making newer releases purely for its own sake, or worse, by a fear of the imaginary market monster.

In the end, the documentation folks were nicely frustrated. You can begin documenting a product if these conditions are met at the minimum:

• A reasonably stable feature set
• An interface that’s at least 80% frozen

Writing in our industry typically involves explaining things to other people. The better the writer understands what he is writing about, the less he has to rely on other folks for technical/product inputs. And to better understand, the writer needs to work real-time with the product that doesn’t change with every iteration. Ultimately, we solved the problem by beginning the actual writing work quite late in the game–that is, when we were reasonably sure that everything was pretty stable and changes would be minimal but we were present in the daily scrum, planning, and iteration-end meetings.

The biggest takeaway personally from Agile was how it offers a ruthlessly-close project tracking mechanism, and the scope it provides to build great professional relationships because you’re a small but tightly-knit team working really closely.

Tags: Agile, Agile in UX, Kris on Agile, Software Development, Technical Documentation, Technical Writing & Agile, Technology, Writing in an Agile Setup

Microsoft is working on a new operating system, "Windows Cloud," aimed at developers working on cloud-computing applications, and expected to launch at the end of the month…

If you want to jibe Microsoft, you can say Windows Cloud is an oxymoron: there’s Windows (OS) and then there’s Cloud (computing), the twain shall ne’er meet. I admit that was wicked. But it’ll be interesting to watch how Microsoft will build an OS that resides in (on?) the Cloud. The least we can hope for is to not having to restart your computer. Sounds stupid, I know but with Microsoft you never know.

Other giants like IBM and Intel have begun to invest aggressively in Cloud computing research.

IBM has assigned more than 200 full-time researchers and has announced plans to invest $100 million in cloud computing.

The world of open source software is not only not amused but alarmed and indignant.

…Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

Which makes sense. Yet, if there are aspects of the cloud that actually deliver value to users, there’s no harm in fully harnessing them instead of dismissing it entirely. Interestingly, Larry Ellison joins Stalman in dissing cloud computing as

…"fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do," he said. "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

Yet, this didn’t stop Oracle from hopping on for the ride on the cloud.

Intel and Oracle also announced a push into cloud computing and collaboration at Oracle’s OpenWorld 2008 conference.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Cloud,Internet,Microsoft,Oracle,Richard Stallman,Open Source