… because it’s an incredibly cumbersome and confusing series of steps. If you’re just finding out, Google Buzz is the company’s foray into the social networking wars, but one whose rollout has been, ahem, socially awkward at best. The problem is that each Gmail user’s messages are immediately exposed to the new network, raising significant privacy concerns.
Just search Google for “how to disable Google buzz” or “how to turn off Google buzz” and look at the dizzying series of results; click through those pages and you see how it only gets worse from there. Perhaps it’s a fair argument too to say that if it’s this hard to ignore Google Buzz, then you can’t truly turn off the service.
As social networks evolve and wrestle with privacy issues, the new kids on the block must anticipate the negative publicity that will inevitably arise. One of the most important steps in crisis public relations is looking down the road to understand stakeholder reaction. Looks like Google passed that step and pushed Buzz way too fast on everyone.
