Buzz Burped !

Buzz Burped !

Google Buzz has demonstrated precisely why - and how - engineers really shouldn't be let loose with human relationships.This, of course, is the failure of the engineering imagination to deal with the reality of human interaction.

Google tested Buzz internally a great deal before releasing it (the product was called "Taco Town" during testing) but the weakness of that is that it doesn't have many people who really hate each other internally. Or perhaps none. And of course stalking would be the sort of thing that would lose you your job at Google.

It's when you get into the grey outside world though that the black-and-white certainties that Google thinks it can apply to search (but which it actually tweaks repeatedly to stave off the people trying to game the search results) break down. And quickly.

We can hope that this real-world example will demonstrate to Google that it has made a real mistake by not letting people opt very carefully in to Buzz. But the question is, will it? | Excerpt

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