Tag Archives: Buzz

Some Google Buzz tips: How to post privately & address your posts to particular people

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

I have been enjoying using Google Buzz the past few weeks (although I wish more people in my network were on Buzz). It has been a great medium for sharing links via Google Reader and then having interesting discussions, sometimes with total strangers, about the links.

But Buzz has been even more useful for quick, asynchronous chatting with friends and family. Gmail is a terrific email program, but it is not so good at threading. When you exchange more than a couple of emails with someone, particularly when the messages are very short, it quickly gets unwieldy. Here’s where Buzz fills the void. The comments feature supports quick back-and-forth conversations that are easy to follow and review later. So far, I have used Buzz to set up book club meetings, figure out where to go for a family dinner and chat with my husband all day long.

But you don’t necessarily want the world to read those chats. By default, what you post on Buzz is public and is recorded on your Google Profile page. Buzz makes it very easy to make any conversation private, but the process is not entirely intuitive. Here’s how you do it.

  1. Type your message into Google Buzz.
  2. Beneath the message you’ll see a button that says: “Public on the web.” Click it and select “Private.”
  3. You’re not done yet. Next to the button is a link that says “Select group.” Click this link.
  4. A list of your groups appears, if you have any. This list is taken from your Contacts. Check the group whose members you want to be able to read the Buzz. If the group doesn’t exist, click “Create a new group.” In the window that opens, give the group a name and select the contacts to add. For example, you may want to add a group containing just your spouse. Then click the Done button.
  5. Click the Post button.

The message will appear with a little lock symbol to indicate that it is private and visible only to the people in the groups you selected. (If you click the Private link next to the lock, you will see who can read the post.) It also won’t show up on your public Google Profile.

Now when you go to post a Buzz, your last privacy setting will be selected by default. So if you want to post a public message, such as a link, you will have to re-select the “Public on the web” option under the message area.

If you are posting a message for a specific person, it is a good idea to identify that person in the message itself. Buzz will send the message to the person’s Inbox, where they are more likely to see it. Here’s how you do it:

  1. In the Buzz message window, type the @ symbol followed by the first few letters of the person’s name.
  2. A pop-up box appears showing all matching email addresses from your Gmail contacts. Select the correct email address. The address now appears in the Buzz message.
  3. Continue typing the message and click the Post button. The post will contain the person’s name, highlighted and linked, instead of their email address. It will also go to that person’s Gmail Inbox.

You can use this same trick when commenting on a Buzz post as well.

Now the recipient of the message can read the post in their Inbox and reply to it using the comments feature. All of the replies should show up in your Inbox. Just like email, but easier to read and quicker to reply.

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Should you expect privacy from online services?

Posted on February 13, 2010 | 4 Comments

I think the answer is no, with some qualifications, which I’ll get to shortly. But here’s the thing. When you sign up for free services like Google‘s various offerings, Twitter, Facebook, free blogging platforms and a myriad of other services online, your value to those companies is in the data and content you produce. It is not in their interest to keep that data private. If privacy is important to you, then it is up to you — and only you — to safeguard it.

The only way you can guarantee online privacy is to avoid free services, including all social networks, altogether. But you need an email account, for instance. Well, there are many alternatives to the free email services. Your ISP, who you are paying to provide Internet service to you, will probably give you one. Or you can pay for an email account with a hosting company. The point is, when you pay for a service, then you have a right to expect a higher level of privacy, as agreed upon between you and the company. (Many people use a free email account for public transactions, like online purchases, and keep a private email account for, well, private communications.)

If you do decide to get a free email account or sign up with a social network, then you should accept right off the bat that you will be giving up some privacy. That is the deal with the devil you make in exchange for free access to these networks. You will no longer have total control over information about you and that you generate. It is best to know this and accept this from the start.

Personally, I like the openness that social networks have brought. I think it fosters communication, collaboration, sharing and understanding of our differences, but that is the idealist in me. Yes, there is a negative side, but that is true of anything with value. I think social networks help us express who we are, and feel okay with who we are.

But if you are going to use these services, and privacy is of some importance to you, then you need to become savvy about how they work. When you sign up for a service, you need to be willing to explore, play with settings, try things and see what happens, and learn what the service is doing and why. This means extra work, but as I said, it is not in these companies’ interest to protect your privacy, so you can’t expect it of them. It only took me five minutes of playing with Google Buzz to figure out that my followers were listed on my public profile and to turn that off. That was well before all the privacy warnings came out.

I have some sympathy for people whose email contacts were exposed by Buzz, because this was not an expected outcome. But only to a point. Because you had to participate in that exposure. You had to set up a free Gmail account. You had to turn on Buzz. You had to create a public Google Profile. You had to accept the list of followers/following presented to you by Buzz without making any changes to remove those who were not acceptable to you. At each point, you could stop and ask yourself what the privacy implications of this are. At the very least, you could wait a few days for the issues to surface. It was only a few hours before many news outlets on the web were posting about Buzz’s privacy issues and the fixes for them.

I think this is a good learning moment for all of us. By all means, play in the social networking playground. But remember that these free services still have a cost. Just like in the real world, online the only one you can count on to take care of yourself is you.

Google’s response to the privacy concerns and instructions for protecting your privacy when using Buzz. And Google may offer Buzz independently from Gmail.

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Like everyone else, I have an opinion about Google Buzz…

Posted on February 11, 2010 | 4 Comments

Google launched Google Buzz, its social media application for Gmail, over the last couple of days, and everyone on the web has an opinion, including me. Some opinions are unnecessarily hostile for a new software application. The social web is a very friendly place for the knee-jerk reaction.

After using Buzz for a little while, I have decided that I mostly like it. Here’s why.

Most people are comparing Buzz to Facebook and Twitter. Buzz does a lot of the good things Facebook does, only much, much better. The interface is cleaner and easier to use. So far, I have not had to worry about catching spam, malware or viruses from Buzz, and it avoids all the inanities of Facebook. The commenting and like features are super-easy to use; the privacy features take a little more figuring out (especially if you don’t use Gmail’s Groups feature), but not much, and they are also easier and more versatile than Facebook’s, as far as I can tell. The integration with Google Reader is especially powerful, and I would like to see that strengthened over time, particularly so that I don’t have to read everyone’s shared items twice.

I like that Buzz lets me communicate very easily with people I email a lot, particularly friends and family. It’s great for quick, asynchronous chat sessions that I would normally carry on over email. I like to see what my friends are reading on the web and quickly comment on them. I would close my Facebook account today and only use Buzz if there weren’t so many people on Facebook who I want to stay in touch with and who seem unlikely to move. Regardless, I think I will be visiting Facebook even less in the future.

Buzz is not a competitor with Twitter, though. It does not even try to do the things that Twitter does well. I use Twitter to find news, links and trends. It’s basically my window on the social web. I like it because I can drop in when I have time and ignore it when I don’t. I would never try to follow high-volume posters like Mashable or the New York Times on Buzz. That would quickly get overwhelming.

Also, my audience on Twitter is very different. It is larger and made up mostly of people who don’t know me, who I assume are more interested in specific topics I frequently write about and post links on. So I will continue to use Buzz and Twitter as complementary networks, rather than try to replace one with the other.

I suspect that Google knows this and that is why they let you feed your Twitter content into Buzz. I disconnected my Twitter feed from Buzz, though. There is too much possibility for redundancy, and besides, I tweet a lot. I don’t want to overwhelm the people following me on Buzz with too much noise. I also didn’t connect my FriendFeed to Buzz for the same reasons.

Some people are concerned about the privacy of Buzz. These people didn’t take a few minutes just to learn the software before getting all upset about it, I suspect. You can turn Buzz off — look for the link at the bottom of the page. You can block people from following you. You can make your posts private. Buzz launches with suggestions for people to follow culled from your email and chat contacts and people you’re sharing with on Reader, but you don’t have to follow any of them.

The biggest concern may be that Buzz posts the list of people you’re following and people following you on your Google Profile page. This is no different from what Twitter does, but it’s a bit more personal, since these people are also your email contacts. It is very easy to turn this public display off, which I did straightaway. Just go to your Google Profile page (click your name in Buzz), click Edit Settings and then uncheck the box beside “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me.”

So you can choose to follow me on Buzz (via my Google Profile) or on Twitter or both. I post more to Twitter and it’s more impersonal but possibly more interesting. But on Buzz we can have conversations about the links I share. Both have value. Where you likely won’t see much of me anymore is Facebook. I don’t think I’ll miss it.

More opinions and help with Buzz:

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