Editorial Note: There’s bigger problems in the world than the brouhaha surrounding Google Buzz. However, in a day and age where we’re being encouraged to be wary of what we share online, Google’s reckless miss-steps and decisions with Buzz are concerning. This article contains strong language.
I’ll be blunt and say it: I’m totally unhappy with Google Buzz. For a product built by no-doubt very smart people, it lacks any realism or understanding of the social context it’s being forced into. Buzz is clearly a product built and designed by engineers. People who are no doubt very smart, and grok the usefulness of location-awareness. However the biggest problem is that they don’t understand the mainstream hesitance around sharing location data with people - and above all sharing it with Google. There’s no reassurance as to why you’re sharing your location, to what accuracy, and - incredibly - there’s no approval of who you’re actually sharing the data with because, to cap it all off, the same brilliant engineers decided that the best system to add social networking to was the most private and deliberately NON-public system known to man: email.
Because, naturally, an entirely private and confidential method of communication is absolutely the best way to determine who the fuck I’d actually want listed as “Friends” in a social network profile. Like hell it is.
Google: I want out of Buzz. I’ve been a 6-year Gmail veteran. I’ve put up with you automatically adding everyone I email to my Google Address Book [which was also entirely stupid]. But for you to then decide that my email address book should be the basis of a publicly-viewable social network account is bat-shit-crazy-bordering-on-irresponsible.
Update: Some have said “You can edit your profile though”. I don’t give a rats-ass: I should be shown who will see my profile, and what data that will shown, before I can actually activate Buzz. Retrospective profile editing is a cop-out.
My email contacts list is not a social graph. It is not a group of people I have chosen to follow, but is instead full of people with whom I have a (sometimes very tenuous) professional relationship, as well as my family and some of my friends. Interestingly, my best friends don’t email me very often, so they do not show up as a part of my Buzz following list.
I’ve just posted a quick update on Happening to the all-new Happening Tumblog. More soon!
If you feel like your technology column is lacking something, it’s probably condescension.
Late last year, I sat down and chatted with Steve Scott for a Mac Developer Network show section on organising press packs for your software release. The segment went live shortly before heading to NSConference last week, and I’ve had a couple of similar emails about it.
I am in the works of a 1.0 product as an indie developer, and your press pack idea sounded really useful and interesting for a release, especially as I’m one to pay attention to all the little details in software. However when I do release it, no-one will have ever heard of me – do you think it would still be useful to work on such a press pack?
Uniquivocally yes. Just because you’re new to the indie scene doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it easy to present your products to journalists: hell, making it easy for journalists to learn about your app is a great way to encourage people to write about it.
I know, first hand, how much work goes into a 1.0 release - both at the day job and now for my own side project - and know that in the grander scheme of things, a Pages document listing your product’s details, is a seemingly small task. But if a journalist can learn enough from your press pack to provide the details for an article, an article that can go straight to press without the writer having to wait for a response from you, then you’ve justified the time investment right there.
The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. … They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.
When iPhone was announced, the big question was when or if it would support Flash. With the iPad the debate is if Flash is irrelevant.
Folks, it’s us, the freaks who understand drive partitioning, regular expressions, virtual disk images, task switching, and shell scripting — we’re the exception.
It makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.
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