Google Buzz Blowback

The story of the week from my perspective has been Google Buzz and the various privacy concerns it raised. It seems clear that Google did not think this one through entirely. The best critique of the issues I've seen so far was Harry Lewis' "What Was Google Thinking?" post.

The latest blog post from the Gmail team may not fully answer this question, but it does demonstrate a willingness to listen to users and try to fix mistakes... and kudos to them for admitting that they made a mistake.

We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback.

That's about as close to "we screwed up" as you're going to get from a large corporation.

For what it's worth, I see promise in Google Buzz. I haven't yet deleted my profile, and if Google sorts out the issues then I might actually keep using it.