Google: Buzz shows need for external testing
Google has conceded the poor reaction to the launch of its social media tool Buzz has taught it the value of external testing. The firm revealed that it did not test the service with any customers before the launch, instead relying on Google staffers to be the lab rats.
As we’ve detailed, the main objection of the service involved an auto-follow feature by which Google automatically added several contacts for each user based on the people they have the busiest e-mail traffic with. The problem was that this meant people added in this way could see details of other people the user was in contact with. That created some unwanted problems, most strikingly in the case of a woman whose automatic additions included an abusive ex-husband: somebody she had certainly had a lot of e-mail traffic with, though largely in one direction.
The firm has now not only disabled the automatic contact additions, but tweaked the system so that it doesn‘t automatically link an account to pictures from a Picasa photo album or the list of articles viewed through Google Reader.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Google’s Todd Jackson acknowledged that testing the service on employees had proven insufficient: “Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn‘t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.”
The company does already have a network of testers who are friends and family of employees and agree to test products on a confidential basis, but that wasn‘t used for Buzz. The main advantage of that network is that includes people from a wider range of backgrounds. Google employees themselves are not necessarily representative of the general Internet audience: they are more likely to have a particularly keen interest in technology and have an attitude that the benefits of services such as Buzz outweigh the privacy implications.
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