Coming so soon on the heels of the underwhelming Google Wave, the company’s next big social experiment seems to be another chink in the armour of the web behemoth.
Buzz, which along with the most recent iterations of Facebook, resembles Twitter has been criticised by Users (Google Getting The Wrong Kind of Buzz: Web Pro) for automatically creating follow lists from the personal address books held within Google Mail.
This makes the massive assumption that Google Mail Users don’t have contacts in there that they don’t mind sharing.
Should any of these Users be looking for a new job or having an affair the rest of the world would now be able to see the mailing habits of their users in a handy ‘follow list’.
Obviously as Google expands to occupy an even larger space on and off the web, the way your data can be stored, used and sold becomes more comprehensive, lucrative and invasive.
It seems to me that the rejection of Google’s new services could start to damage the reputation of their primary ones: i.e. search and advertising.
