Google Buzz Meets Social Roar

Google mounted it’s newest adaptation, “Buzz”, attached to your Gmail account, the social users experimented, the tweets flew and Google is hamstrung by its own creation, and it took just a week. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

I’ve been keeping up with Google’s attempted entry into the social media space (aside from Blogger, FriendFeed, YouTube, I’m talking about the conversational space) through Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, and the news has been not so good, Google-wise. I received the same message that you did when signing into my Gmail account last week, asking whether I wanted to know more about or implement the Buzz enhancement. I deferred, awaiting what I expected would be a very public reaction among the best of the user universe. I mean, the comments were fast and furious on the last Google pie-in-the-face, Google Wave.

By the end of the week, it was clear that Google’s Buzz was taking your private network and making it viewable to everyone in it. You could, of course, keep addresses private, if you could only find the control that made that possible! Over the weekend, Google responded with a more obvious solution. But it’s clear the user universe is struggling to take the management of email visibility away from Buzz and self-determine who in their networks sees everyone else.

Read more noise about Buzz here and here.

This is a key (IMHO) to the functionality and success of LinkedIn and other social networking utilities, placing the user in total control of the invitation and recommendation process as well as making the entry into a conversation a solo activity, not something in which you carry your entire network. As Google struggles with ways to become the chatter channel of choice, it will probably make more missteps. Even so, it’s a high wire act I always enjoy watching.

The thing I admire about Google, in a perverse way, is their tolerance for risk. Is there something you admire about them, or are they the 800-pound gorilla you love to hate?