Google Buzz has been the center of attention this week to anyone who has a Gmail account. I have to say that Google Buzz took me by complete surprise, so of course I wrote a blog anout how it is Google's new spam system. Well now I'm writing this article telling you how to disable Google Buzz, yeah thats right turn it off, deactivate, kill the buzz. Before I tell you how to tell Google to buzz off, I have to give credit to Cnet for figuring out how to completely disable Google Buzz.
Cnet's instructions are pretty straight forward, however you don't necessarily have to do all of them, but it is highly recommended.
First go to the bottom of the page and click buzz off, kaboom google buzz is turned off, or so it seems. As cnet pointed out, everything that was buzzed about you could still be on your google profile, so if you really want to wipe out Google buzz traces don't click buzz off, first go to your Google profile and delete every entry by hand. Now you can remove all your followers and block them. Here are a lot of questions that probably come to your mind "How do you get to my google profile? Well let's say your gmail account name was googlebuzzhasfreakedmeout, you would simply go to google.com/profiles/googlebuzzhasfreakedmeout and delete each comment and posting by hand. You will also need to block all of your followers, if you really want to wipe your Buzz slate clean. If you really want to deactivate Google buzz, I highly recommend for you to read Cnet's full article on opting out.
Now if you don't want to turn off Google Buzz that's fine, however I'd like to point out something that the washington post exposed earlier this week, if you had emailed someone when buzz first launched by the @reply system it could have easily exposed their private email. Well, Google has fixed this problem, so now your friends private email is replaced with asterisks. I would like to point out that the article doesn't state if this new privacy function is retroactive, so I would recommend checking your Google profile for any breaches in privacy.
Now I'd like to say some of my own personal opinions as I usually do in my news stories. What was Google thinking when they developed this app? Did they really think that everyone would want to use it? The reaction has been quite the opposite. I hope that Google retires the Google Buzz app and quits their attempt of making a social network. Google is supposed to be a search engine, they should leaving social networking alone. I have a pretty good feeling I'm not the only person that feels this way.
