Now that I've actually had Google Buzz for a few days, the ideal and the reality are sinking in, and it's a complicated scene.

On the plus side: a look at this recent item by DeWitt Clinton a Google developer, confirms a lot of what I talked about in my last post. Buzz isn't about Google, as much as it is about making the entire Internet better, more social, and interoperable at a much deeper level than it currently is. And unlike Wave, for which they built a whole new omni-protocol that attempted to do everything, Buzz is built on a bunch of smaller protocols already finding acceptance as awesome solutions for real world problems people have seen over the last 10 years. Whether Google Buzz succeeds or fails as a stream in your Gmail inbox, its effects are going to be profound and positive.

On the other hand: Google made a decision full of massive tradeoffs by launching it the way they did. While I typically am skeptical of complaints about Google disrespecting privacy, it's hard to deny that dropping Google Buzz into people's inboxes and auto-connecting them to others made this woman's life worse and possibly put her in danger. This is to say nothing about all the friends and acquaintances I've seen turning off Buzz, or being angry in general, for its sudden intrusion into their inbox - a place that many people view as a private, intimately cultivated space, for good reason.

I am sure that Google tried its very best to target its algorithms for auto-connecting people on launch so that you would only be connected with friends. I take what Google does in good faith. But they've surely got to realize that even something that's 99% accurate isn't enough when you're talking something the size of Gmail. If they didn't realize it then, they sure must now. The woman's case above is the stuff class action lawsuits are made of.

My basic position on Buzz is that it represents the future, in some form. If they fuck up the launch, and I think it's still in an unstable place where it could go either way, then the worst case is that Buzz will get turned off. If that happens, I don't think it will stop the adoption of the amazing platforms it uses, even if people don't know that the seed for them was a brief experiment called Google Buzz. And if they figure out better privacy controls that protect people, and everyone calms down a bit, and Buzz sticks around and achieves some level of success, well, we'll only get there faster.