ow it's much more obvious when you first create your public Google profile how to keep Buzz from displaying all the people you're following. Also: Has anyone figured out what Buzz is good for, yet?Again, a quick disclosure before we begin: You're reading The Gadget Hound on Yahoo! Tech, and Yahoo! is a competitor of Google's, so keep that in mind as I render my testy opinions.
Anyway ... as I blogged yesterday, Google's new Buzz social networking service has been catching all kinds of flak in the past few days for a feature—or privacy flaw, depending on how you look at it—that instantly creates a list of people for you to follow based on who you e-mail and chat with the most; that list is then displayed in your public Google Profile by default, essentially displaying your list of online intimates for all to see.
Critics of Buzz quickly pointed out that the public list of "people you follow" on Buzz could be all too revealing—say, if you're been trading e-mails with another company about a job offer, or coordinating schedules with your friendly neighborhood madam—and complained that the "opt-out" option for making the list public was way too subtle. (I posted instructions on how to make the "people you follow" list private right here.)
Well, someone at Google apparently agreed, and Buzz has seen a series of tweaks in the past 24 hours, including a much more prominent checkbox option that reads "Show the list of people I'm following and the list of people following me on my public profile" when you first set up your Buzz account.
You can also now block anyone who's following you on Buzz, not just those followers with public Google profiles. Now, I have to say: I didn't know you could follow someone on Buzz without a public Google profile, and I have no idea why one wouldn't be able to block a follower who doesn't have a public profile ... but in any case, there you go.
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