What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s a-happening.

[I'd first like to acknowledge Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for the title of this post, and for Google for enhancing their service offerings in such a way that the lyrics to "What's the Buzz?" from Jesus Christ Superstar are incredibly apropos—especially the lines "If you knew the path we're riding,/You'd understand it less than I."]

In all seriousness, as someone who has had a lot of faith in Google over the years and held their development process and products in such high regard (I used to do as many on-site usability tests for them as I could, I wrote a book on Blogger, I worked for a little bit as a search quality rater to understand the process and PageRank better, etc.), the Buzz rollout was the least Google-like thing I’ve ever seen. I was disappointed—not in the Buzz platform per se, but in the handling of the integration of that platform into everyone’s online lives.

The Rollout

Google introduced Buzz by holding a launch event and pushing out a short introductory video (below).

Within a few minutes of the launch event, Google users started seeing bits of this platform integration pop up in their GMail accounts. Within a few hours Buzz had intertwined itself into the mailboxes of millions, and Google mobile apps like Maps were enhanced with additional data—buzzes from users geotagged and available for reading.

And then all hell broke loose. The first tweet (not buzz, mind you) that I read post-rollout, from an industry person whose opinion I hold high regard, was from Mary Hodder, who said: looks like Google #Buzz is sort of a newsfeed (friendfeed?) of yr friends activities (facebook?) + twitter + gmail. ZOMG. info overload.

That pretty much sums it up: information overload. Unless, however, Google Buzz is your one true social networking interface, which of course is what they would like to be. While the current iteration of Buzz isn’t it, and there are so many aspects of control and customization either not yet available or so scattered throughout other Google products, I can see where they’re going and that place makes sense to me from a technical standpoint. But Buzz doesn’t make sense/isn’t going to be usable to the people (a large number, to be sure) for whom “Those I email most != my social graph”.

The (User) Response

So let’s go back to the very brief introductory video for a moment and look at some of the key points Google makes about Buzz. For each point, I’ll summarize the general conversation I heard/read/watched unfold around it:

• “uses the friends you’ve already made”
  • pro: I automatically have a bunch of people to follow and who are following me, without doing any work
  • con: the people in my GMail account are not necessarily my friends; the original auto-follow had some real-life implications.
• “share publicly with the world or a small group of your closest friends”
  • pro: I can push my buzzes to the world or to contact groups I can set up, like the best of both worlds between a public and private Twitter account
  • con: this “group” business is totally unclear, how do I do it?
• “link sites you already use so friends can keep up with what you’re doing around the web in one place”
  • pro: I can hook up my photos, shared Reader items, my Tweets, my blog posts—who wouldn’t want that all in one place?
  • con: people, I don’t like you enough to see all your crap in one place; there’s a reason I use separate products for different types of social interaction.
• “sends these comments to your inbox so you don’t miss them”
  • pro: cool, I won’t miss comments on my items, or replies to items I’ve commented on. I can always filter them out.
  • con: why do I have all this extra email now?

I think you get the picture. For every positive comment I (or Tim O’Reilly) might have about Buzz, someone else has a negative one—and this isn’t a case of some sort of divide along Internet power users and non-power users at all. Some of my favorite and most technologically-inclined friends have turned off and unlinked themselves from Buzz—some for reasons of privacy, some for information overload, some to keep the barriers up between the social networks they use for the particular reasons they use them.

NOTE! If you think that the “turn off Buzz” link in the GMail footer links actually removes you from Buzz-aware products, it does not. You have to disentangle yourself, as CNET.com describes in this post.

For those users who kept Buzz, the feedback was enormous and positive—as in “do these things to keep moving in the right direction because you’re not there yet, Google.”

The (Google) Response

Google has started to respond to user concerns and requests, most notably (and quickly) the issue of auto-following. Even those who fall in the “Buzz is Bad” camp, and who have turned it off and removed themselves from its clutches, have noted that Google has admitted they screwed up with privacy settings and immediately fixed things/started to give users more control.

I will bet that they will respond similarly to all of the feature requests Buzz users have (collapsible threads, better friend-finding aids, categorizations/collections of posts, Buzzing from one’s profile page, and so on—there are a lot). Don’t get me wrong—I am disappointed with the way in which this alpha product (in my view) has been pushed onto people in ways that were unnecessarily disruptive and potentially damaging. But I still have enough faith in them that they’ll get things fixed, and quickly, because the numbers of people using it are huge.

Moving Forward with Buzz: Privacy

The last time that Facebook messed with privacy settings, the EFF issued a statement about it. Many people have wondered in the past week why the EFF has not released a statement about Google Buzz and its privacy implications. Well, they did write about it a few days ago: Protect Your Privacy with Google Buzz. They do offer an important tip to Google (also known as “something I would have thought was a no-brainer but apparently wasn’t”: “Google could significantly reduce this problem simply by making the list private by default, so users could opt-in after reviewing the suggested list.”) but more importantly highlight the following: “If you took the default options and didn’t opt-out or edit this list during profile creation…”

This isn’t a case of blaming the user for Google’s issues, for indeed the initial privacy meltdown was Google’s fault for not even giving people a warning about this service that was going to actually use elements of the Google Profile and all that it entiailed. But as I’ve said before regarding Facebook and Twitter, everyone has to be responsible for their own data, and that includes understanding what the default settings mean when you register for a service.

As the EFF does, I recommend the PC World article: “Google Buzz: A Privacy Checklist”.

Moving Forward with Buzz: Become a Power User

Between ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, a new Buzz user can learn new and exciting things about how to tap into the platform both in your GMail interface and your mobile interface via Maps or other mobile apps. At the very least, you can see the quick list of missing features and know that it’s true, you’re not crazy, those threads don’t collapse. You can also learn about Buzz extensions, subscribing via RSS, and using Textile Markup Language in your buzzes.

Becoming a power user also means understanding where Buzz has been (even in just a week). how it’s being adopted, and how it can be extended. Mashable has you covered with the first, and Google—via the Buzz API—takes care of the second.

On the day that Buzz rolled out to users, I buzzed “hey, I’m writing a post, ask questions” and got a bunch of responses that mostly had to do with privacy settings and sharing information.

The privacy issues have either been discussed in detail elsewhere or have completely changed (or both), and the sharing issues are specific to the service and your own privacy settings.

My general tips consist of two basic steps:

• Understand which sites you’ve connected to Buzz and modify (via “edit”) the sharing settings for those sites. This will determine what gets pushed to Buzz from your account, and to whom.
• Always check your list of followers to see who is part of your “public” and block them if appropriate (go to their profile page and block them, just like with Twitter).

These two basic content and account related tips give you the same basic control over the content you push to Twitter or Facebook (if you use those services) and then some, although admittedly the “and then some” is hard to see at first.

Moving Forward with Buzz: In the Classroom (no, really!)

As intrusive as Buzz has been to some, it has been illuminating to others—myself included. Buzz is about aggregating data, it’s about being able to do other things (publish, remix, share) with that data, and it’s about getting groups of people to talk to each other in ways that might never have happened in a single (isolated) social network such as Facebook or Twitter. (Mashable hints at this in a post that pits Buzz against Facebook and Twitter—although that’s not exactly the battle that I think Google wants to fight.)

Buzz opens up a whole new playing field for discussions of virtual communities, and for discussions of the practices and rhetoric employed in those communities. There are questions of interface and user interactions embedded in Buzz—we haven’t even discussed the use of Buzz in mobile mode, which includes an overlay to Google Maps resulting in a quasi-augmented reality experience—and the implications for data aggregation outside of its typical spaces (e.g. aggregating Tweets outside of a Twitter client, blog posts outside of the blog environment, etc). Not only is there plenty for students to study and write about, but also to come face to face with—again, as if the Facebook incidents weren’t enough—regarding their own actions online and the traces they leave…everywhere.

Turn it off, turn it on, disentangle, or don’t—but whatever Buzz looks like in three months or (gasp!) even a year is going to fundamentally alter the path by which content is shared and the interfaces through which we share it. Hopefully this post has clarified some of those moves, enough that you have a basic knowledge of the Buzz platform and the ways in which you can control how it works for you (or doesn’t, as the case may be for many).

EDITED 02/17/10 to add: Google makes it easier to fully turn off Buzz and delete your profile. The “Turn of Buzz” actually does, now.