Friday, February 12, 2010

Google Buzz Reprieve

Yesterday I posted some of my thoughts on Google Buzz on my other blog.  Basically, I decided to disable it, because the way it was set up, it formed a connection between my full name and my online content.

I did some thinking after that post, and I believe there's a way to get what I want out of Google Buzz without discarding my mantle of online anonymity:  remove all the links from my Google Profile, and only post to Google Buzz privately.

That way, there will be a public profile with my name on it, but it won't be publicly associated with anything that I produce online.

It makes the Google Profile much less useful, but it allows me to use the service in the way that I feel comfortable with.

On a related note, here are two posts from LifeHacker that I found very helpful:
I don't want Google Buzz in my Gmail inbox.  In fact, I would prefer it to be in a separate page, like Google Reader, so the first article was especially helpful.  I don't think I would continue to use it if it kept filling my inbox with other people's imported posts.

Anyway, I'm going to try enabling it again, after I have purged all of my content sources from my Google Profile.  All of my sharing will be private, and my name will show up publicly on other peoples' public posts that I comment on (which is just fine).  If it annoys me (or distracts me too much), I'll turn it off again, but that will be on preference, not on principle.