View From the Phlipside – Google Buzz

My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the movies and more. I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this The View From the Phlipside

You’ve got to wonder how long it’s going to take the folks at social media websites to get the message. I mean social media is all about messages and communication and connecting with people. Yet somehow the folks who are the center of this hot new media still don’t seem to get the message that we keep sending them, over and over and over again.

My stuff is my stuff and I don’t want you messing with it. It’s all about privacy. Yes, the social media are public forums in some form but we want control over how public it gets. From our point of view the default position should be what I said before. What’s mine is mine. I may or may not be willing to share some of my stuff, like who my friends are or what I’ve been doing and where I’ve been going. But it’s all my stuff and I want you to respect that.

So it’s amazing to see the same mistake being made over and over and over again. Facebook has face planted several times over the last couple years when they’ve overlooked the privacy issue. You would think that the other big boys on the social media block would have learned from the firestorms that always follow another privacy mistake by Facebook. Of course with a firestorm of protest from the Facebook nation seemingly every third day over just about anything maybe Google just tuned it out. Which would explain why they’ve managed to step into it just like so many folks before them.

Google debuted their newest service Google Buzz which is a new social media experiment. Tied in with your Gmail account it’s supposed to help you expand your social interaction “…beyond status messages”. My first thought when I saw that was that they hadn’t seen my Facebook page recently. I’m already getting all kinds of things beyond status updates, sometimes to the point where I’d like to plow under Farmville and build some nice quiet condos. But I digress.

The problem with Buzz is that the default position was on and the default position started making your photos available, your contacts available, your history available. I can understand falling in love with your new product but this is either blind love or real arrogance. So for the last weekend Google engineers have been slaving over hot binary code trying to fix this problem. When they finally manage to get the privacy issue fixed then we can take a look at whether or not we need yet another way to socialize on the world wide web.

We can only hope that eventually the titans of the web will soon start to learn their lessons once and for all. And remember that my stuff is MY stuff.

Call that The View From the Phlipside

“The View From the Phlipside” airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright – Jay Phillippi 2010