Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Go mail go tweet go facebook google buzz.

by Hermilia C. Banayat-Nas
(12th entry)

Google Buzz. Where you have 5 default followers. Where you can post status messages. Where you can collect friends. Where default privacy options are Public. Here we go again.

Google Buzz is another innovation through Gmail. The feature is the ability of the account user to add feeds from other social networking site (except Facebook?). The objective is to let the user set her default website to Google/Gmail instead of Facebook.

Okay, the catch is what you post in GB stays in GB. At webmonkey.com this is called a "serious limitation," a "one-way street" because you can post feeds from other sites but not to other sites. Of course there was a suggestion that people can eventually make this one way street two way.

While this might be a "serious limitation" for web developers and social networking junkies, I think that GB being a newer player took the right step to start off as a "one-way street". GB developers might have read and reread issues that troubled other social networking sites and consider themselves enlightened by the lessons from the past. But GB can only learn through its own experience.

On the other hand, the account holders--who have control over their accounts and who have the option to choose more stringent privacy settings, and who have experienced attacks on privacy and disastrous outcomes from imprudent posts--have enough first-hand experiences to make the same mistake with GB. Come on, you have regretted posting nude pictures (without tags) in FB once... what makes you think this might be different?

1 comment:

Owen Ricalde said...

nagbabandwagon effect lang ang google. they want to be omniscient/present in all tech related stuff. chrome, nexus one, chrome os, android, googlegroups, blogger. i think it's a strategy. all google related posts are easily searched in google since all that google related data are in their server. hmmm.