Google Announces Improvements and Response to Feedback

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.

After two days with millions of users buzzing, Google announces changes to Google Buzz and explanations about how the privacy works. From a previous post I mentioned and showed you how to make your Google Buzz contacts private. Google explains why they made made the contacts the way they did and made some changes in the setup process to make it more obvious so you can easily turn this feature on and off.  As for more information on this issue and to read the complete article, please visit the Google Gmail Blog.

Google explains how Buzz works “Like Gmail’s chat service, Buzz helps you create a social network by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with most. You can change, delete or add any contacts you want to follow.”

With that being said here are some of the changes Google made to Buzz.

Google states that you need a Limited Profile, at least a first and fast name, this is done so they can put a name with your posts.  Every time you make a post,  Buzz with notify your followers. The list of followers and those that follow you are not made public until you go through the setup process.

Google says that they received a lot of feedback that the checkboox that you can select to make your contacts private was to hard to find and not clear enough. Because of this, they changed the notice to be clear. These changes should be made and rolled out to Gmail users sometime today. – I still believe that by default that your contacts should be private by default and you have tell Buzz to go public. That way if a user misses this step, they will have their contacts private until they change it.

3 Changes to Google Buzz

1. The option to show / hide followers/following on your public profile will be made more visible.

“If you don’t want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can always opt out during the profile set-up when you first use Buzz or at any time from the edit profile page. We are making this option more prominent in the set up process, to ensure everyone who wanted to hide these lists can do so easily.”

2. Users can block anyone who starts following you.

“We are making it easier to block anyone, by adding “Block” links to the list of people following you. Previously, you were only able to block people from following you after they had created a public profile. Now, you can block anyone, regardless of whether or not they’ve already created profiles for themselves.”

3. Google clarified which of your followers / following that will show up in your public profile.

“Initially, we showed you a list of all the people who would be following you once they created a public profile. However, only those contacts who had already created a public profile would show up on your public follower list. We’re making this clearer by explicitly distinguishing which of your followers have public profiles and will show in your public list of followers. With this change you’ll be able to see who is on the public list of followers that everyone else sees.”

Hopefully theses change will help make Google Buzz a better Social Media Tool. We will have to sit back and test Buzz  and have a little fun while we are at it. As more information and news comes out I will update everyone. If you want to follow me on buzz, by  visiting my Google Profile and click on the follow button.