Tag archive: Buzz

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit in Federal court against the FTC yesterday, hoping to compel the government to enforce a privacy agreement it reached last year with Google. EPIC alleges that Google’s brand new privacy policy, which will allow the search giant to share user data across all of its services, including YouTube, Picasa, Gmail, and even Search, violates its previous agreement to allow users to opt-out of… Read More

Google’s social strategy has been anything but smooth. Buzz fell just short of disaster, +1 has yet to make any real impact, and Google Profiles effectiveness has yet to be determined. But Google will not (and more importantly cannot) be deterred from bringing a competative social platform to the table. And its latest effort is the new people widget. The Gmail add-on now brings relevant information about your contacts to the surface. We… Read More

You win some, you lose some. As Google is rumored to be closing a deal to acquire wildly popular Groupon, it’s also delaying the launch of its social networking feature. Dubbed “Google Me” by the media, talk about the Facebook rival first grabbed attention in July, when a Wall Street Journal report broke the news that the search engine giant was in discussions with Facebook game developers, such as Zynga. Nothing ever came of those talks, or at… Read More

Internet giant Google has proposed paying some $8.5 million to settle a lawsuit over privacy violations that occurred when it launched its Buzz social networking service earlier this year. Some 30 percent of the proposed settlement money would go towards legal fees associated with the case, $2,500 each would go to the seven Gmail users who brought the suit, and the remainder would be split amongst organizations that promote online privacy and… Read More

Beginning today, Google will begin showing a confirmation page to early users of Google Buzz, asking them to review their privacy settings and make sure they're disclosing only information they're comfortable with…since that may not match what Google Buzz is actually showing other people. When Google launched Google Buzz back in February—with a lot of fanfare to Gmail users but little warning—the company took a… Read More

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a formal complaint (PDF) with the Federal Trade Commission, urging the regulatory agency to open an investigation in Google Buzz. Google recently launched Buzz on February 9 as a social add-on to its widely-used Gmail email service and drew a firestorm of criticism from consumers and privacy advocates for failing to give users full control over what information was available to other… Read More

When Yahoo’s Digg-like Buzz ranking system debuted in February, Yahoo opted to keep its fledgling service in the kiddie end of the pool for the first few months by closing content submission to all but a few select publishers. But Buzz is all grown up now, and Yahoo will open up the deep end on Tuesday night when Buzz moves out of Beta and into its final format, in which anyone can submit links. Initially, only 100 publishers had… Read More

Further refining the homepage formula that has helped bring it reign in millions of eyes daily, Yahoo announced a new service on Tuesday that will allow users to vote for the most popular third-party content, helping dictate the site’s front-page features. Yahoo Buzz closely follows the style of sites like Digg by allowing voting, but also draws on Yahoo’s search by capabilities by factoring search requests into the sorting… Read More

A new site has been developed that can measure the amount of market-share and even the quality of buzz candidates in the upcoming 2008 presidential election are receiving. The gloriously-named Wonkosphere was developed by Steven Corman, a professor and Arizona State University and co-founder of Crawdad Technologies. It searches the Web for postings about a candidate and also measures whether the buzz is largely positive or negative. It… Read More

These days, parents are increasingly concerned with their children's' online social lives: what are they posting to their profiles on sites like MySpace? Are other members of these social networks sending inappropriate materials to their children? Are kids putting their privacy and security at risk? Enter GenMobi, which today announced the creation of its Buzz Ideal Social Network, which will offer a number of features… Read More