Google Buzz launched last week in rapid fashion to a mixed reception. Using email, which is inherently private as the means for generating a public social network seems like an odd decision when put as starkly as that. The address book inside GMail is a valuable resource, it does represent the people that someone is in contact with, but using this alone is a weakness. There have been some strong reactions to the seeming breach of privacy that Buzz created. Google have rapidly revised the product to fix this private to public disclosure, but I wanted to explore how they might have made these initial product decisions they way they did.
GMail has many tens of millions of users, other Google applications do not have anywhere near as many. So it is a tempting place to base a new realtime sharing application. Google Reader is not nearly so widely used, RSS feed reading is much less mainstream than email. So by choosing GMail as the host application, it was probably hard to factor in other sources of data and keep a consistent experience for different sets of users. Drawing on Google Talk chats, Google Reader subscriptions and the GMaill frequent contacts would have generated a more accurate social model for the person, but limited the number of users. A much smaller number of people would use all three applications and so benefit from a more coherent social model.
The other aspect of this is the initial decision to make Buzz automatic, without a confirmation step. I think this came about as a result of testing and belief in the product. Along with a desire to avoid the blank slate experience. Social application testing requires a set of social networks to be created. This is time consuming to set up, so the idea of automating it seems attractive. Also people who are testing the application are likely to be heavy users of the host GMail application. So people who have a gmail account, but their primary email is elsewhere will be poorly represented in this testing. For many people GMail is an additional account for other professional activity, so having clients and former partners automatically added is a disaster for them. These cases will be far outside the testing community that Google will have had for Buzz. You are not your user community is just as true for general purpose tools like GMail as it is for other areas.
Social tools should never automatically act on our behalf without a confirmation phase, except when the outcome is known and obvious. The set up stage of a new software product is something that must require confirmation. Buzz now does offer this important step.
Rapid turnaround is a good thing, but also considering the needs of non-mainstream users who can be affected by your initial product decisions is important too. There is definitely a strong product in socially filtered activity streams, but using multiple sources of interest in a person is required to determine if that person is relevant. Simply email someone a lot is not enough, it is good to see this being tested at a large scale.
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