Are You BUZZing

[astral]

http://www.google.com/buzz

The new feature from Google.

It looks like competition for Facebook, Twitter and the like.

[Bizz]

Na take me to my account.

[noahvail]

Got Buzz without them asking me; got set up with people I didn't want for it without them asking me. I dumped them, and my kid in NZ dumped them....without asking them.

A Google social project? Probably designed for social engineering...

[H2oDunc]

People might want to read this before signing up. Rather cheeky of Google to say the least. I for one will not be signing up!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technolo...3google.html?em

[cdnvic]

Google is fast becoming the "Me too!" company. If it's not careful it will Yahoo itself.

[bendejo]

Seems every week or two the media bombards us with hype about new things that don't interest me. Let's see, 3D tv, the new iThing, and now this. I know I left something out. And it's still only February.

I'm concerned this Buzz stuff will compromise the security of gmail. Oh well, time to find a new email service.

[nikster]

Buzz has had a huge impact on me. I don't trust Gmail anymore. I looking for a replacement.

I am not paranoid, I know they're out to get me. Oh Wait. Let's rephrase. I am not paranoid, but Buzz was turned on without my permission, and signed up 2 followers and 2 people to follow right away. This sucks. If left unattended, Buzz might just make all your frequent contacts people to follow/followers. It's unclear who gets added - what's clear is that it happens automatically. Wife, meet girlfriend. Annoying people, please see what I am doing right now. Even if I don't use Buzz - please see what other people I know. For businesses, that might be very interesting. I mean - what the heck? It's like the people at Google are complete retards and didn't know any of these things could happen. And it's worse if you don't care about Buzz, click away the intro, and think it's gone. Because its still there.

/rant

I have turned it off, but not before manually deleting all my followers/followees. Maybe I guess Gmail was just too good to be true, and now the old TANSTAAFL principle finally gets applied: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. There's always a catch.

On a final note, all this could have been avoided with a simple dialog saying: "Look, here's Buzz!! It's cool!! It's free!! Do you want to join? Yes/No." Then I could have checked no and been merrily on my way.

[astral]

I went into settings/Labels and removed Buzz from the visible list.

[zzdocxx]

Thanks for the tip astral.

Funny thing is, I noticed it but I always steer clear of that type of thing.

But they didn't hook me up with any list of friends, hmmm maybe I am not popular enough.

[bendejo]

I never clicked the Buzz link, and do not have a Google profile. I clicked the "turn off buzz" at the the bottom of the gmail page and the link in the left column is gone. I wonder if I have a watch/follow list; I don't want to attempt to view any of it because I think that may cause all this to activate.

This may be of help to some

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html