Google Buzz - anatomy of a slow motion train wreck

It is quite interesting watching this unfold. As far as I can see, with Buzz, Google made a number of fundamental errors:

- The team that developed Buzz are apparently all young, male, supergeeks - alpha early adopters - who have clearly supped deep of the Kool Aid that is Google approach to Privacy (ie its dead, get used to it), a la Eric Schmidt

- The Google Business Model wants to open up people's data as much as possible (hence the Schmidtian view on Privacy), and thus the service was built to grab and expose all data it sees as the default condition

- Google say Buzz product was user tested, but I suspect it was by the same demographic who built it rather than the people who may use it.

- Older, Wiser heads were clearly either not involved in the product review process, or overruled due to the above points' considerations.

So the stage is set for a service that is built to be massively abusive of user privacy. This is of course despite the mounting evidence out there that:

- Get it wrong and you are in for a blogstorm - see Facebook Beacon.

- There has been a clear hardening of attitudes towards privacy abuse from users overall, in the last 2 months especially

I suspect Google, having the level of self belief it already does, was unable to properly account for these emerging risks in any internal review processes.

And so Buzz launches, and Google, being the biggest gorilla on the block and no slouch at self-promotion, gets 9 million messages in as many minutes, or whatever, and crows this from the rafters - but on Twitter people are saying "Hey, I'm just testing it not a rabid user, and its filling my inbox with sh*t I don't wan and calling that a win" (I paraphrase) and are starting to grumble about the privacy implications.

And then the sh*t hits the fan as all those users start to realise that Buzz is exposing their Gmail addresses to all and sundry. What the Googlers also probably didn't grok is that the email social graph is totally different to the curated, friend based social media one, and that scared a lot of people as all sorts of people who are not safely screened friends start to appear for all their followers to see.

Google's initial approach - as per any extremely self-confident company - was to tell these users not to be silly, that this was the way, the truth and so on, and to get its PR flacks and proxies to blog about how this was no big deal etc etc.

Which was dumb, and again showed the misunderstanding of the difference between email and social networks - it was only a matter of time before something like this happened (they had been warned already by a number of bloggers):

F**k you, Google — I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. — There's a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts. — You know who my third most frequent contact is? — My abusive ex-husband. — Which is why it's SO EXCITING

At this point they had started to hit the train buffers, but the Google position was amazingly conceited still (I'm looking at the timeline on Techmeme for all this by the way) - making some basic changes but not addressing the central issue of privacy:

We designed Buzz to make it easy to connect with others and have conversations about things that interest you, and it's great to see millions of you doing this already. It's still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.

No worry, no hurry. Belatedly they scurry to start fixing Harriet's issues, but even so its lazy, casual:

We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:

1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.

2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.

We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.

Next Few Days! Guys, you have got a few hours at most to sort this out - its the weekend, loads of people have now got the time to look at it (like this blog post) and loads of ordinary Gmail users are going to come home from work and discover this happening to them.

It is very clear what Google will have to do in the short term:

- Firstly, disconnect Buzz from GMail until they've sorted all this out. But they will resist it (update - are resisting this) as it destroys their instant market share massive

- Secondly, make the "expose privacy" functionality opt-in, not default. But they will resist this even more strongly as that is no doubt the core internal value proposition.

- Thirdly, Grovel. Admit they got it wrong. Blame an Intern for it all. Just do something to show they understand the errors of their ways.

It will be this grudging retreat to the obvious endgame position that will send tech blogger and user concerns into the stratosphere, and watching it take place is like watching a trainwreck happen in slow motion!.

(Update - first reluctant steps to change as we suggested seen over here - still not any formal heavy duty apology though, I think that's an error. I also don't know if this enough yet - especially given the legal interests that are apparently lining up)