Rubénerd!

Checking my junk mail account on Sunday, I was reminded of Google Buzz's impending demise. Enclosed for your consideration is a typically Rubénerd-esque longwinded story, complete with some more technical notes.

Google Buzz got Pownce'd

Clicking the link in my Gmail profile thing, I was directed to Google Takeout, a service that sounds like I'm taking a quantum physics hard drive out for dinner, but in fact is a service launched by the Data Liberation Front.

This is similar to what Pownce did in 2008 when they realised adding a few token features to a cloned version of Twitter wasn't panning out, and they decided to shut down. The difference here is that Google's Takeout worked, I tried exporting my Pownce profiles dozens of times before giving up. Oh well, everything I had there was just a reposted from Twitter anyway.

Choosing "Buzz" from their worryingly large list of options gave me a link to download my 25MB Buzz archive with 5,654 files.

Cheerio old chap

I've poked gentle fun at Google a lot lately for their litany of discarded and failed social networks, but I'll miss Google Buzz. Not for it's initially terrible privacy concerns or because I used it directly, but for what it did diligently in the background archiving my content from around the web.

Perhaps you used it in the same way, but I had Google Buzz configured to repost all my Google Reader shared items, Friendfeed posts (remember that site?) and tweets, amongst other things. When accessing Gmail using POP (cue the IMAPers!), I realised these items were suddenly being flown to me, emailed if you will. By bees.

I set up a quick filter in my local honeycomb store that is Thunderbird, and suddenly I had a nice archive right here on my local machine of all my content from around the web. Pretty sweet stuff I must say.

This background nectar gathering service was probably not what Google had in mind when they launched it, but it was nevertheless useful, not to mention rather tasty. Oh well, back to subscribing to RSS feeds directly.

Technical Notes

• The ZIP archive downloaded from Google Takeout consists of all your Google Buzz posts as individual HTML files.

• Don't worry about the estimated file size, it's completely wrong. The initial estimate was 25MB, but was actually only 11.1MiB. I downloaded it three times just to make sure.

• If you use CookieMonster or an equivalent cookie whitelist because you're a secure, private munchkin, don't forget to temporarily enable googleapis.com as well as google.com or you'll be stuck in an infinite redirect loop.

• I like honey. Bzzz.

Google recently released Google+, a new social network. Do you think you need another social network? ~ The Daily Post

You mean, another Google social network, or another social network in general? I've had revolutionary Orkut, Knol, Jaiku, Wave and Buzz accounts that went nowhere, so it's hard to muster enthusiasm for yet another of this company's efforts. If it gains some traction I'll look into it further.

One thing's for sure, Facebook sorely needs some competition. I'm uneasy about trusting Google with my personal information (not necessarily their fault), but I trust them far more than Facebook. Then again, I'd trust Diaspora more.

As for the name, it's almost as lame as Apple's Ping, but not as bad as Qrocity!

Has Google Reader (or Google Accounts in general) implemented a stricter timeout system for logins, does anyone know? I've been automatically logged out several times today with the above message cheerfully displayed when it never used to happen before.

I'm thinking it could be my newly cleaned out cookie whitelist for PermitCookies in Firefox, but just want to make sure. Could Buzz have anything at all to do with it perhaps? If they are timing out sessions earlier it could be beneficial for security but I tend to have Reader permanently open in a tab and I'd hate to have to re-login every hour or so.

Google Buzz was launched recently, and unless you've been living under a rather large rock (presumably with a cavity big enough for your entire body) you would have seen the outpouring of criticism with regards to privacy -- I'm saving the fact I'm not using the service because I don't see the need for it for another post! Speaking of which, when was the last time I logged into Google Wave?

Despite hardened cynics like Scott McNealy who famously quipped that "privacy is dead, get over it", and more recently Eric Schmidt with his latest outburst, people still expect a certain level of privacy online, and their expectations (for better or worse) aren't set by terms of service pages that nobody reads, but instead from what they expect.

People don't worry too much about privacy on Twitter (and IRC et al) because the entire point of the service is to be an open discussion forum and to see what other people are doing. People's expectations are: if you post it on Twitter, it's public knowledge. Aside from the fact it was less sleazy and it was designed by people who weren't recruited from Geocities, people moved to Facebook from MySpace for the added privacy, so friends could only see what they were doing.

Facebook blew it, could Google dodge the bullet?

The problem is, Facebook blew it. Their dodgy practise of changing their terms of service every five minutes, allowing third party applications ridiculous levels of access to private data (if not through you then through your friends), and their latest blunders with altering the privacy settings to public for people who'd never changed said settings (the very people they know they can get away with it with) have meant virtually no tech savvy people trust Facebook any more. Once trust like that is lost, it's lost for good. If it weren't for the fact most of my high school friends are on it and use it to contact me I'd delete my account today; I'm already in the process of stripping it bare of anything.

Google Buzz is this defining watershed moment for Google. Unlike Twitter and MySpace where the expectation was everything was open, people expect their email accounts to be private, even moreso than their Facebook profiles. Google Buzz publishing your most emailed friends is completely unacceptable and I think represents one of the biggest breaches of trust online that I can remember.

Uhhh...... Ruben, just turn it off lolz !!!1!1!one!!

Then there are well meaning people who say things like this:

@Rubenerd You can just 'turn off buzz' down the bottom.

Unfortunately, no, that's not true at all. Even if you do disable Google Buzz, your unwittingly shared content and people lists still exist, hence the controversy. For some people they didn't even accept the invitation for the service, it was simply turned on. I side with the Microsoft-ians on this one: If Microsoft pulled a stunt like this back when they still had relevance they would have been hit by hundreds of lawsuits left right and centre before lunch. That reminds me, the sushi I bought from the supermarket an hour ago is probably chilled enough to eat now, I'm hungry.

Fortunately it seems Google has got the message and people have started apologising. I'd like to chalk this huge blunder up to negligence, but it's hard for me to accept a company with such resources and talent wouldn't have figured out such a service would cause concerns.

In the meantime I've been a Gmail user since 2004, but I've decided to start trialling my own hosted email again. I'm a guy just starting out in this industry so I should be eating this stuff up, but this whole notion of cloud computing is really starting to scare me. Perhaps I shouldn't have had three cups of coffee on an empty stomach, I've got the jitters.