Do no evil, unless, uh, that one time...

So I am sure almost everyone has heard of Buzz by now but for all the wrong reasons.  I think there is a lot that can be said about this situation but I am going to take an engineering perspective on this.  What I find most interesting is the consequences of what Google did.

For those who don't know, Google has decided again to try to enter the social networking market.  The first attempt failed pretty bad.  I mean who still have an Orkut account?  So Google in an effort to quickly gain a bunch of users tacked their newest attempt into their Gmail application.  So what happened?  They auto-added everyone to service and automatically exposed all that information to the world.  What I find is interesting is the accidental things, like since the most contacted people were exposed to the world spouses could find out about infidelities, bosses could find out about recent contacts with recruiters, and what is worrisome is that Mini-Microsoft may have been exposed.  I find it interesting the legal ramifications of this.

So how does an engineer get into this problem and what can be done to prevent it.  Well I think this comes from the same tunnel vision that produces poor user experiences.  So it is well known that engineers design products that they want.  Engineers are tinkerers.  So I want a widget or program that does what I want.  Other things are that the user experience is not the importance to most engineers.  For instance most projects I start are never about a neat user experience or non-engineer experience, I am interested in the algorithm behind the machine learning or the new searching algorithm.

Well I think this is likely the problem with Buzz: Engineers developed a program they wanted.  They got to the end and thought, hey this is great who wouldn't want this?  (I have similar thoughts about things I write.)  It also seems like this was pushed very hard from a 'make a profit' perspective.  It is commonly thought at this time that social networking is the way to large ad profits.  Which may be true.  If you like or may like something then your friends are likely to like them.  So you have engineers who didn't step back to say, 'how will this affect people' and 'should we do X or Y' and you have a company who is really trying to break into social networking.  This is what I think was the problem.  It is likely a neat idea.  I would love a place where I can have all my social networking stuff in one place.  However I don't feel like Buzz is the answer.  For reference I have turned it off as quickly as possible.

So how do other companies mitigate these things?  For one, you never turn on stuff like that by default.  The second is a process which looks at the customer experience.  I know I think a lot about how people use my work and how to make their experience better.  I think it is a situation where you need to assume everyone is not like you.  So what would someone who thinks differently than you think of X.  this helps a lot.  I just think it is an interesting thing.  I think Buzz will fall into the same trash bin as Orkut and in this case it is completely the fault of whomever enabled this by default.  At the end of the day companies that think they can force their users into something they don't want usually lose, I feel Google may have done that to themselves.