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Google has taken another pass at addressing privacy concerns over its new Buzz service. The big change involves the autofollowing feature that made lists of Buzz users’ most-contacted e-mail acquaintances public: The following is no longer quite so automated. Instead, Google will show new Buzz users a suggested list of people to follow, allowing users to follow all of them, some of them, or none of them.

I haven’t seen the revised Buzz startup process in action yet, but judging from the above screenshot, I’m not sure that Google’s done everything in its power to ensure that nobody will be startled by the contents of their public list of followers. Google still seems to pre-select people to follow rather than making you check them off yourself one by one. And it doesn’t explain on this screen that the list of people you follow will be public unless you suppress it.

Still, this is close to the solution I suggested in a post yesterday: Making the whole follow-your-friends process optional. The company says it’s also ending Buzz’s initial practice of automatically linking to activities in users’ Google Reader and Picasa accounts; from now on, you’ll have to turn on these options. And it’s adding a Buzz tab to Gmail’s settings to make it easier to tweak Buzz-related options.

It’s good to see Google prove so willing to perform major surgery to a new service so quickly. I’m not sure if this will quell all reasonable concerns about Buzz, but I hope so: The service is both promising and full of other quirks which I’d love to see Google get to work addressing.

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It’s now been 72 hours since Google launched its Google Buzz social-sharing service and started rolling it out to Gmail users. Much of the coverage so far has been grumpy–especially when it comes to the fact that the initial list of people you autofollow on Buzz is based on who you talk with most often in Gmail, and that list is public unless you choose to make it private.

To its credit, Google has responded swiftly to complaints: It’s already tweaked Buzz to make it more obvious what information the service is making public, and to help you crank up the privacy settings.

(Side note: I kinda wish that Google’s blog post hadn’t talked about users who “thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them).”If Google is making this information public, I don’t see how users can think it’s being done “without your knowledge.” If you think you don’t know something, then…you don’t. I think Google meant something along the lines of “thought their contacts were being made public without any disclosure…”)

Google’s explanation of the post-release changes points out that millions of people are now using Buzz…and maybe that’s part of the issue. Rather than let a sizable pool of testers outside of Google try the service out before opening up the floodgates, it’s gone straight to a full-blown launch. Sounds like the company didn’t expect some of the confusion that’s happening.

Me, I’m finding much to like in Buzz. For instance, it has one of the nicest photo-album viewers I’ve ever seen anywhere:

I’m not going to dump Twitter and Facebook anytime soon, but Buzz is full of potential and I can see it becoming the third major service of this sort. Given Google’s spotty history with social stuff, that’s impressive in itself.

But multiple aspects of Buzz in its current form are frustrating. And quite frequently, the service leaves me just plain confused.

Consider the following points:

* If you’re on a PC or Mac, Buzz is a feature within Gmail and therefore requires that you be a Gmail user to use all its features. But if you’re on a mobile phone, it’s a separate service, not a Gmail feature. Odd! (I assume the chances are 100% that Google will introduce a completely de-Gmailed version, maybe very soon.)

* Even in a desktop browser, the Google Public Profiles that are part of the privacy concerns over Buzz don’t live in Buzz. I understand why, since the Profiles provide personal info that goes beyond Buzz-specific stuff. But it’s still confusing and ungainly–if you’re in Buzz and want to figure out who somebody is, you’ll probably have to click out of Buzz and into his or her Profile…and then back into Buzz.

* I stared at the yellow strip alongside the left-hand side of Buzz posts for 24 hours before I figured out what it was trying to tell me. It’s saying that the posts to its right are new since the last time I checked Buzz. I think.

* I’m really confused by Buzz’s Buzz-in-your-Gmail-inbox feature. When someone comments on one of my posts, I get a thread in my inbox, but it starts with a message that looks like it’s coming from me, listing my own post–the one I’m well aware is there, since I posted it. It’s especially unhelpful when I’m looking at the message in my iPhone’s inbox, since the subject line is the pointless “Buzz from Harry McCracken,” and I have to open the message to see if I care–otherwise, I can’t even tell which post someone has commented on. (In Gmail itself, I at least see a snippet of the post and the names of commenters.

* When I heard that I could pump my Twitter feed into Buzz, I got excited. But it takes hours for Tweets to arrive in Buzz, and Buzz clumps them together so you can’t see all of them without an extra click. I’d much rather that Buzz treated an incoming Tweet exactly the same as it did an item posted in Buzz.

I want to like Buzz. There are numerous things about it that I do like. But it’ll be far easier to like if Google does some serious streamlining of the user interface. Let’s hope that it gets simpler before it gets more complicated. (Google is already talking about all the features it wants to add to the service–an API, Wave integration, etc., etc….)

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What’s the most common first tweet that Twitter newbies make? That’s easy: “Trying out Twitter” and variants thereof. Nearly everybody who joins the service starts out in a mode that’s experimental, confused, and–for the rest of us–tedious. Which is okay, because on any given day, only a small percentage of tweets come from beginners.

Google Buzz, however, is different. Google could have launched it as a closed beta a la Google Wave or Google Voice, Instead, it skipped tryouts and went straight to Broadway, by opening the service up to every Gmail user over the next few few days. To a degree that’s really unusual in the history of the Web, Buzz will be chockablock with millions of confused newcomers all at once. Expect “trying out Buzz” and similar sentiments to be the primary form of Buzzing at first.

I still have access to Buzz only on my iPhone, not via Gmail. I’m only following a few people, and the majority of them haven’t buzzed at all yet. So almost all the buzzes I’ve read so far have been on the Web version’s “Nearby” tab, which simply uses your coordinates to show you updates from people in your general vicinity. A few of them are saying things that are at least vaguely interesting–or, at least, are alerting us to their eating activities. But yup, buzzing at the moment seems to mostly be about Buzz.

(Side note: Yes, that’s my iPhone–most people aren’t aware that the “S” in iPhone 3GS stands for “Short.” I special-ordered an iPhone 3GL…)

Wonder how long it’ll be until enough Buzz users have the knack of the thing that reading it can be as enjoyable a way to waste spend time as perusing Twitter?

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I’m through with declaring any tech product or service to be a “killer” of any other tech product or service. But I will say this: If Twitter is found dead anytime in the next couple of years, someone’s going to need to hide Google Buzz, which debuted this morning, from the police.

Buzz seems to have most all the features that Twitter is missing, and Google is clearly going to take advantage of all the benefits of being Google to make it popular–most notably the inboxes of unspecified millions of Gmail users who’ll get Buzz as a service-within-the-service. My impression is that Google really, really wants this to be the dominant service in the still-evolving category of “that thing that Twitter does that doesn’t have a good name yet.”

I’m still figuring out Buzz’s implications, and so far I’ve been able to try it out only briefly, and only on my iPhone. (Google is rolling out Buzz to Gmail users over the next few days, and I’m not one of the very first people to get in.) In a moment, a few of the questions that are popping into my head about the service–but first, here’s Google’s blog post about Buzz, and a little movie it made about Buzz:

1. Will more features matter this time? As lots of folks are pointing out, Buzz bears a striking resemblance to FriendFeed, a service that was widely hailed as a potential Twitter killer until Facebook bought it and more or less put it into suspended animation last August. Like FriendFeed, Buzz has none of Twitter’s innumerable limitations and irritations. But being more powerful than Twitter hasn’t helped any site compete with Twitter to date. (Exception: Facebook, which feels more and more like PowerTwitter these days–but which had the advantage of being far larger than Twitter in the first place.)

I don’t think being more powerful than Twitter is enough in itself to give Buzz an edge. (Then again, I think of Twitter’s 140-character limit as a pro, not a con.) But more features+e-mail integration gives Buzz a distinct identity. And Google will be able to plug away with the service forever if it feels like it, unlike FriendFeed or almost any other previous Twitter competitor.

2. How big is the potential market for Buzz? In theory, at least as big as the total number of Gmail users, I guess. But we know that there are plenty of perfectly sensible people who are aware of Twitter but can’t understand why anyone would use it. Will they be more open-minded about Buzz? It’s also obvious that plugging a new Google service into Gmail isn’t a guaranteed road to sucess–if it were, Google Talk have a far higher profile than it did.

3. Will “PageRank for Buzz” work? The single worst thing about Twitter isn’t the Failwhale, or spam, or people announcing that they’ve just eaten a poached egg. It’s that Twitter does so very little to help me find interesting people, updates, and links. Actually, it’s never done much of anything in that regard other than suggest that I follow a bunch of famous people.

4. What will the ads be like? Twitter’s ongoing disinterest in putting traditional ads next to tweets means that we don’t completely understand the implications of sophisticated ad targeting of status messages. If you mention bocce will Buzz give you ads for bocce balls? Will that annoy and/or creep anyone out any more than people are annoyed and/or creeped out by Gmail’s ads?

Google, which is really good at using computers to identify relevance and quality, is at least going to try to apply such techniques to Buzz.  If it works, Twitter runs the risk of becoming AltaVista–a service that was widely beloved until Google came along and proved that AltaVista’s results were a largely undifferentiated pile of links.

5. What does Buzz mean for Facebook? I’m still not clear on whether Buzz is going to feel like a loosely-knit, somewhat impersonal network of friends, acquaintances, celebs, and people I’ve forgotten I’m following (like Twitter) or a true replication of my social world online (like Facebook). I’m not even sure if Google knows–maybe it’ll sit back and let Buzz users decide.

If Buzz does end up feeling like a truly personal social network it’ll be Google’s second major pass at social networking after the popular-in-Brazil Orkut. And it’ll be the competition with Facebook that”ll be more interesting than the one with Twitter.

6. What does Buzz mean for Google Wave? On the surface, it’s aimed at consumers and Wave is meant for business users. No major conflict, right? Um, not: Google stressed today that it thinks Buzz is great for the workplace, too, and therefore intends to launch a corporate version at some point. There are any number of ways in which Buzz and Wave are different, but the situation reminds me a little of Google’s simultaneous development of Android and Chrome OS. Clearly, Google isn’t a company that’s afraid of competing with itself or coming at a big challenge from two different directions.

7. What does Buzz mean for Foursquare? It features a checking-in feature that’s decidedly similar to the trendy local-doings service. I’m not going to check in to both Buzz and Foursquare, but if there were a way to push Buzz to Foursquare or vice versa, I’d consider it.

(Side note: I’ve tried Buzz’s check-in feature, which tries to determine the business or other location you’re at automatically, twice so far. The first time it didn’t figure out I was at Google; the second time it guessed that I was at the Computer History Museum rather than the nearby Starbucks where I am right now.)

8. How fully-baked is Buzz? I can’t judge that until I’ve used it in Gmail. So far, though, it’s slick in some ways: The iPhone/Android version is, like Gmail, one of the most applike browser-based services I’ve ever seen. But it’s oddly slapdash in others: buzz.google.com invites me to go to Gmail to try Buzz even though it’s not enabled there yet, and when I try to post a Buzz on my iPhone it fails every time. And for all the things Buzz does, it’s launching without numerous obvious features, such as the ability to send Buzz updates to Twitter.

9. How patient will Google be with it? There are two kinds of Google products: The ones that get so much TLC that they improve at a dizzying rate (Gmail, Google Chrome) and the ones that either die or fester (Google Groups, Google Lively, Froogle/Google Product Search, Google Groups).  Buzz will be an example of the first type of Google product. Won’t it?

10. What does Yahoo think about the name? It’s already got a service with the same moniker. Then again, Yahoo’s Buzz is a shameless knockoff of Digg, so Yahoo might want to be careful about accusing anyone of copying anyone else.

More thoughts once I’m fully into the service. I’d love to hear yours, especially if you’re already buzzing and being buzzed…

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