Indian googler

It has been quite a Buzz for Google during the past week, ever since they unveiled the new social networking platform on February 9. Some of the

features - that Google introduced with the good intent of helping prospective users - backfired forcing it to launch a damage-limiting exercise. After poring over a barrage of criticism accusing Google of not taking care of privacy issues, it is now rolling out a number of changes in the settings.
Google has acknowledged that they "didn't get everything quite right". On the Gmail blog, it said, "We're sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard to improve things based on your feedback."
But to begin with, when Buzz was launched on February 9, among the first to hop on were the many who had been weighed down by the "heaviness" of Facebook or the "strangeness" of Twitter. One of them was Karthik Nagesh, a 35-year-old English lecturer, who has been shunning social network sites. "When I logged on to Gmail, I saw this Buzz thing. I just read the introduction, and said ok, and bingo, all the guys I was chatting with were right there on Buzz."
What sets Buzz apart from sites like Twitter or Facebook is that it's right inside Gmail, like chat. That Google thought of embedding Buzz within Gmail, is not surprise considering the fact that for most people email is the primary mode of communication and thereby they keep their Gmail open most of the time. And that has helped Buzz get a lot of users like Nagesh who were anyway using Gmail and chat a lot.
But just a few days into the launch, it turns out that most people who signed up were not like Nagesh. Ironically, it's the feature of "followers", made popular by Twitter, that has given Google the biggest headache. (Your X number of followers gets updates about you, and you get the updates of the Y number of people you follow.)
Buzz was built in such a way that the moment you set it up, you had all the X number of people - you frequently emailed or chatted with - as your "followers" and they in turn were "following" you. Google didn't give you a choice, with the noble intention of sparing you the bother of finding people to follow. Google assumed that you would be interested in following everyone you frequently emailed or chatted with.
But most people felt outraged at the way Google took a decision on their behalf. Now onwards, Google said there would be no auto-following, but Google will merely suggest people you could follow, what it calls auto-suggest.
The second point that raised a lot of concern is that the names of your followers and people you follow were getting displayed for everyone to see on the public profile. And the option "not to display" was hard to find. Acknowledging the concerns of its users, Google has now made the options more visible. Moreover, all initial users will now get a second chance to review their followers, whether to keep following them or unfollow them.
Another important change Google effected was that users' public Picasa albums and shared content on Google Reader will no longer be automatically connected to Buzz.
A major complaint was that there was no link to make changes in the settings of Buzz. Google has fixed that now. It has provided a Buzz tab within the Gmail settings. To be fair to people who don't like Buzz, Google has also provided two alternatives: 'Do not show Buzz in Gmail', and 'Disable Google Buzz completely.'
Evidently, it has been a tumultuous first week for the web giant. Not all issues have been sorted out. Sandhya Rao, a software engineer, who has been "checking out Buzz", feels it's still not user-friendly. "Though it's a good idea to embed Buzz in Gmail and notify the new Buzz arrivals, it's difficult to locate the new comments. For example, a comment made today to yesterday's posting will lie way below the subsequent postings. So you need to scroll through old postings and comments to locate the new comment!'
As more people use it, and as Google fine-tunes it, we will know in the coming days if Buzz will become roar to scare others on the field.