With any new feature, there are always improvements, considering Google spends millions upon R&D of any new feature they roll out. Money is no object to them, so why wouldn’t they spend whatever it takes, making sure it is ready.  I’m sure all this was very well thought out, and intended for open content to be shared. Has anyone heard of Google’s Social Content? Then keep reading.

Do you want to be seen or not?

• Are you sticking your yard sign in the front or back yard?
• If you have something to hide, don’t sign into Buzz. If your wanting to promote your content, by all means log into it.

• That is the question all should ask themselves. A very simple one, I think most can answer.

• Most have no problem, putting themselves on the map with Google Maps, Google Profiles, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and all the other social bookmarking sites.

• I think it is because they want to be f0und, and or promote theme selves. Giving as much information to Google as one can do, Google in turn, promotes those much higher, which makes perfect sense, making them in turn look best also.

Think about your Twitter account. Don’t you want to surround yourselves with popular friends and followers? Of course you do, and so does Google. Same Reason they are promoting Mashables,  Pete Cashmores, and EV’s  of the world. Actually, Google is promoting all who join to some level of degree, depending on how popular, how many friends, followers, and how much information you have provided. So hope we are on the same path here. I just hope I don’t loose all the millions of friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook. :LOL:

Do you want to see what others see, but you don’t (ordinarily)?

Who is in my Social Circle?

Your social circle was developed long before Google Buzz! If you did not know it or not. Logging into your Social Circle is very cool, in that you can see all of your friends, followers of Twitter, listed in alphabetical order, every wanted to see that kind of list? Bet so, knowing I have.  Also, you can see how others became your friends, from a hierarchy of friendships, if the above was not enough.

Your social circle is essentially a group of connections including these contacts:

• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers groups in your Google contacts
• People you’re publicly connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed
• People who are contacts of those in your immediate social circle

See a list of your social circle connections at [google.com/s2/search/social]. That page shows your direct connections, secondary connections (friends-of-friends), and some of the content that each of those connections has published publicly to the web. You can also reach this page by clicking the link next to “Results from people in your social circle” on any Google search results page that’s showing social search results.

Googles Response to privacy issues;

And I Quote~ “Remember that the social search results you see are personalized just for you. Other people will not see the exact results that you see because they’ll be shown content from their own social circle.

If you don’t want to see social search results, you can simply sign out of your Google Account.”

Simple enough?

Happy Searching!

Features: Google Social Search

Print

Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.

Watch a video overview of Social Search

What kind of content is in Social Search?

If you’re signed in to Google, you might see social search results for a particular search at the bottom of the results page under “Results from people in your social circle.” All the content shown within Social Search is publicly-available online through Google and other search engines. Social Search simply highlights content from your social circle to provide a personalized search experience.

Here are some of the types of content you might see:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
• Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web and from websites linked from their Google profiles
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions

If you only want to see such results from people in your social circle, click Show Options at the top of the search results page to open the Options panel. Then click Social to filter your results.

Who is in my social circle?

Your social circle is essentially a group of connections including these contacts:

• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers groups in your Google contacts
• People you’re publicly connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed
• People who are contacts of those in your immediate social circle

See a list of your social circle connections at [google.com/s2/search/social]. That page shows your direct connections, secondary connections (friends-of-friends), and some of the content that each of those connections has published publicly to the web. You can also reach this page by clicking the link next to “Results from people in your social circle” on any Google search results page that’s showing social search results.

See how to change and troubleshoot your social circle

To learn more about the details on Social Search, click one of the links below.

Why don’t I see social results?

How do I improve and customize my social results?

Will my content be shown to other people?

If you don’t want to see social search results, you can simply sign out of your Google Account.

Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service

SAN FRANCISCO — When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy.

China has a lot of room to talk!

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government.”

Mr. Morozov is a researcher on the impact of the Internet on totalitarian regimes at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University under a fellowship financed by Yahoo. In an interview, he said the flap over Buzz “definitely undermines Google’s credibility when it talks about freedom of expression.”

Sounds like Google changing Buzz protocols, will hurt Google’s credibility.

In an e-mail message, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, said, “Google remains completely committed to freedom of expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of protecting both.”

Mr. Jackson defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience to users and that many liked that feature. He said that it was very easy for users to edit who they were following on the service and who could follow them. He also said that anyone could hide their list of Buzz contacts with a single click.

After numerous bloggers complained that the privacy controls were difficult to find and adjust, Google agreed to make changes. In a blog post Thursday night, Mr. Jackson wrote that the company had made it easier for people to hide their Buzz contacts and block followers whose identity was unknown.

“It is still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”

Mr. Jackson said Buzz had proved popular, with tens of millions of people trying it in the last two days.

But some critics said that Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat correspondence as the basis of a social network was fundamentally misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically created from e-mail conversations.

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.

In an expletive-laden article that was widely cited on the Web, a blogger who writes about issues related to violence against women complained that Google had made her fearful. She said that she had unexpectedly discovered a list of people, which may have included her abusive ex-husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, following her and her comments on Google Reader, a service for reading blogs and automated news feeds.

“My privacy concerns are not trite,” wrote the blogger, who uses the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs. “They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up.”

In a further effort to contain the fallout, Google reached out to her and made changes to enhance the privacy of shared comments on Google Reader.

Some privacy experts said that Google had made matters worse by making it difficult for people to hide their lists of Buzz contacts after they realized that those lists had been made public. Some users assumed that they could simply turn off the Buzz service, but that proved inadequate.

Yes, you can log in, or out.

“You want to have a simple rollback mechanism, so once things are not what you expected them to be, you can get out quickly and not have to play a game of Whack-a-Mole,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert and assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Google said it was planning to address that issue soon.

Not necessary, as this is what it is intended for, Like it or Leave it.

Google is known for releasing new products before they are fully ready and then improving them over time. But its decision to do so with Buzz, coupled with its introduction to all 176 million Gmail users by default, appears to have backfired.

Bull Crap, only those who felt victimized which is a smidgen of the 176 million Gmail users making a wave.

“It was a terrible mistake,” said Danny Sullivan, a specialist on Google and editor of SearchEngineLand, an industry blog. “I don’t think people expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with. And if there was a way to opt out, it was really easy to miss.”

Related Posts

• January 29, 2010 -- Yahoo Doesn’t Care, Why Should You? (5)
  There is much talk in the past of black hat techniques. Never try to fool the search engines, if caught, you can be thrown into the sandbox forever, never stepping back into the animal carrier that ...