Google Buzz : Randomly Connecting Strangers Since Last Week™
I’m not sure why Google released “buzz” with a name far too similar to a similar product from Yahoo! without bothering to think it through a little better than they did. “Half Baked” is about the nicest way I can think of to describe it. Usually when Google releases a product that is far from finished, they offer it to test users instead of pushing every one of their users onto the playground before it should be open to the public. Some would call this an abuse of their member database and I can’t really disagree. At the very least, it is an abuse of their users’ privacy. Automatically adding friends and contacts and friends of friends and friends of contacts and contacts of contacts certainly couldn’t have been deemed a good idea inside Google, right? Seriously? But then again, Google Contacts is still the worst Contact system I’ve seen in 7 years, so maybe they did think this was a good idea. Maybe they thought conversations between strangers like this would be good, clean, fun entertainment for the internet:
or maybe they forgot that whole “beta” thing and hit the “go live” button a couple months too soon.