Taking On Twitter

Google has taken on social networking giants Twitter and Facebook with a launch of its new social media sharing site called Buzz. But can it make the grade? “Google’s next big thing – the Buzz social networking Twitter-a-like – has only been available for use for a couple of days, but already it has fired up a storm of privacy complaints – many from journalists. Google Buzz offers a way of keeping contacts up to date with your current status, in much the same way as Twitter or Facebook’s status updates. Designed to be integrated into Google’s existing products – including its GMail webmail service – Buzz was rolled out earlier this week for both desktop and mobile devices. Sadly for Google, the complains started flowing pretty soon after: in order to quickly populate your list of friends, Buzz automatically follows other Buzz users that you frequently communicate with through Google’s other services such as GMail and Google Talk. While this automatically gives you a populated list of people to follow and allows your most common contacts to see your status update, it seems Google missed one important point: your Buzz friends list is public by default.”