My experience with Google Buzz so far has been that everybody on it is complaining, but everybody's writing tons of comments and entries and starting discussions in a way that I haven't seen on Twitter or even Facebook.<p>Maybe it's just the crowd I hang with, but to me that seems to be a good sign (not the complaining, but how it sucks you in and makes it easy to participate).
The thing that pisses me off about Buzz is the fact that it just arrogantly assumed that A) I wanted to be a part of it and B) that it had the right to determine what my friend relationships are.<p>I really feel like a social network needs to gain my trust and acceptance before I join it. I just don't want people "friending" their way into my life without my consent. I really felt like my Gmail was violated by some annoying machine that muscled its way in, demanded I interact with it and then flooded my inbox with comments by all the most irritating people I've deliberately unfriended elsewhere.<p>I'm sorry but I'm just not letting Google circumvent the community building pathway that every other social network has had to endure. Switched off.
I enjoyed this little experiment. See people talking about privacy issues in Buzz threads:<p><a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?uip=1#buzz/search/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://mail.google.com/mail/?uip=1#buzz/search/privacy</a>
It's funny that the first thing people ask is how to turn it off. If you are reading these comments only opposed to reading the entire article, then you can just goto the bottom of the page and under gmail views there is a link to turn it off. Seemingly simple, but very obscure location.