With a clean interface that resembles Gmail, Buzz is thankfully ad free—the all too familiar Facebook distractions suggesting targeted advertisements aren’t found here.
Getting Started
After the brief initial set up, I began making posts to get a feel for the tool. I found it very easy to add hyperlinks and images to posts. Captions can be added to selected images and posts can be accessed by a click of a thumbnail.
Buzz boasts that it is connected to sites you already use, like Twitter and Flickr, making cross site sharing a snap, and it also sends messages straight to your inbox. Likewise, you can add photos and text to Buzz without a browser, by simply sending an e-mail message.
There are not a lot of formatting options within Buzz, but since this is a Google tool I don’t see it staying this way for long. As Buzz evolves, I imagine that it will have more of the tools that bloggers and social networking butterflies are accustomed to using, such as font attributes and other goodies.
Privacy Concerns
Buzz is a Gmail add-on that began appearing in inboxes last week prompting users to turn it on. Once I did, it didn’t take long to add people to it because they were already there. Buzz knew who I e-mailed frequently and suggested these individuals as people to follow.
While I found this convenient, it seemed that not everyone agreed. This feature has since been altered because of concerns with privacy. Now, Buzz merely suggests contacts, rather than automatically adding them. According to Google’s own blog, more than nine million users have already complained that Buzz had violated their privacy without regard or apology.
In a recent interview for CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave his personal perspective on security as “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” While this is good advice for using the Internet in general, not everyone found it encouraging in regard to using Buzz.
Later, Google responded that it was making changes to Buzz so that users could have more control over who they follow, who can follow them, or what information they decide to make public or keep private.
Like other social networking applications, the young Buzz has to find its balance. Over the past few days, Google has already changed many aspects to the application in response to user complaints.
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