Current Events, Buzzzzz
Buzz, living up to its name, is generating headlines and is the new favorite case-study for my iSchool class discussions. Frequently, there’s some tech story in the headlines that makes its way into a wide range of class discussions — often discussions about policy, ip, security/privacy; sometimes about design — the iPad vs Kindle. Google is dominating these last few weeks with Buzz, the social networking system that Google unleashed on its Gmail users a few weeks ago.
With respect to UX (user experience) Buzz is a cautionary tale about user testing without rigor and with respect to policy, Buzz is a terrorizing tale about hard-coding settings into technologies that do not fit with people’s communication and social norms and bearing the litigious fallout.
Imagine yourself as a person who uses Gmail. You are also a person who maintains a blog (or a few blogs), a collection of photographs on Picasa, a number of bookmarks and feed subscriptions in Google Reader. You use this email account for communicating with a lot of people with whom you maintain a range of types of relationships — grandparents, close friends, some social acquaintances, coworkers, clients. Based on these relationships, with any given contact, you may have preferences about what blogs or photos sets you reveal or conceal.
Buzz aggregates your various digital communications and publishes them into one place (Buzz) and to a set of people from your contact lists. It also publishes your location to this feed. It’s easy to think of some benefits of aggregation and of sharing geolocation data, but the issue with Buzz was that many users were unclear about how to opt in/out of Buzz when it was released and so were opted into default settings that did not take into account that a person might want to regulate what information they share with what people in their contact list.
User testing
Google reports that it tested with 20,000 or so employees. Google employees were testing this system in a Corporate Gmail accounts so their contact books were not full of such a range of contacts as the average Gmail user.
Legal/Regulatory
- 2/9/10 – Google releases Buzz (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-buzz.html)
- 2/16/10 The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the FTC urging “charging that Google’s recently launched Buzz service violates federal consumer proteciton law” (http://epic.org/privacy/ftc/googlebuzz/Google_Buzz_Press_Release.pdf); with specific recommendations “to require Google to make the Buzz service fully opt-in, to stop using Gmail user’s private address book contacts to compile social networking lists, and to give Google users meaningful control over their personal data”
- 2/17/10 — class action complaint filed in San Jose federal court on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a 24 year old Harvard student, Florida resident, by law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. William Audet of Audet & Partners LLP in San Francisco (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7034912.ece)
It is
An expensive mistake for Google in court and in public opinion. A good lesson in usability testing and looking for test-design weaknesses. And likely, a major landmark in shaping the ways that users can control and adjust settings for social computing applications.