As I never tire or stating…I’m a huge Google fan…given my job I pretty much have to be. Cut me crosswise and I have Google written in concentric circles….I’m currently reading a book about those awfly clever people. So I was a bit taken aback earlier this week when I opened up my Gmail to find an invitation to join ad new social network platform called Buzz. OK ‘cool’ I thought…just what I need…another social network to be annoyed by use for two weeks then ignore. When I checked it out I was more than slightly weirded out to note that they had taken the precaution of jump starting my network by hooking up a bunch of more or less random folk from my Gmail distribution lists. The people involved had been neatly selected to be my followers and I was selected to follow a bunch of others.

I know Google is pretty munch omniscient…but even I thought this was a little high handed of them to suggest which of my diverse bunch of correspondents might like each other. I’m guessing they looked for emails where I had included multiple folk in the CCs and figured since I knew them they would probably know each other…a fair assumption but a little rude and potentially disastrous…a couple of scenarios ran through my mind and I got goose flesh just thinking about them.

As it turned out my mild surprise was as nothing to the rain of pain that descended on the Googleplex with everyone from the Canadian government down sharing their concerns/paranoia over this over enthusiastic feature. Google is much more than a day late and a dollar short to the whole social media thing.They have a ton of loyal Gmail users (like me) but those 100 million or so users barely compare to the 400 million Facebook users and I can see how it would be attractive to launch with a built in user base and Shazam! instant social media giant.

In fairness Google took the criticism well and have responded by changing the way the product works and has retreated behind “we were just trying it out and looking for feedback” defense..the last refuge of the scoundrel, but it does rather neatly make the point as my old grandma used to be fond of saying… just because you can doesn’t mean you should.