What the hell is that Buzzing???

In my weekend long Take on social-networking sites today we take on the newest and potentially most annoying one: Buzz.
As any of the 100 million gmail users has found out, with or without their consent they now find themselves stuck on some lame Facebook status-update esque site in a community with every person they may have ever contacted from their gmail account. Google thought they were doing their members a favor by intergrading their BUZZ accounts directly with their email account but they didn't take into account that there are some major privacy issues here. A BUZZ circle was created using Google Artificial I Intelligence by automatically starting out with the 20 most contacted people in somebody's gmail account. This seems innocent enough if you are a Righetti and it means your FantasyFootball mates and a few TOR readers are now in your circle but then again we write a daily blog about our miserable lives
There was a great article in the Times about the public being up-in-arms as people's circles were exposed to the world without their permission which was an huge black eye for Google who prides itself on it's privacy settings and encryption techniques. The article went on about complaints from activists whose entire list of followers were all of a sudden made public and about businesses whose suppliers and customers were now out there for all to see. The best one though was a complaint from some chick engaged in a secret extramarital affair whose husband now got wind of it because some dude he thought was some innocent acquaintance was in his wife's top 20 circle.
Of course this entire social-networking thing (Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, MySpace, AsianAvenue, Buzz) has already broken down the walls of privacy by allowing people to bombard their social circles with pictures, stories and posts but in those cases the user has actively opened their lives up.
Google apparently didn't realize that a dude who is twiddling his secretary might not be thrilled to have said secretary appear on his Google Buzz list. With Facebook there is an 'accept' requirement for new people, with Buzz people are already there and the only way is to goto your settings, search through your Buzzmates and figure out who you can quietly drop without coming across as a self righteous ahole. .
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry