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YesterdayYesterday reviews I wrote a long intricate rant against Google Buzz.  It’s not because I hate GoogleGoogle – it’s actually quite the opposite. I was mad at Google for Google BuzzGoogle Buzz because I love Google. And I think they can do so much better. Well – since most of the 9 million posts (in 2 days!) on Buzz have been complaints about it’s features, they caught on pretty fast and are doing a wicked-good job of cleaning up the mess they made!

In their Gmail blog this morning, Google admitted they had a long way to go with their pet-project-slash-extremely-important-GmailGmail-feature:

We’ve had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback. In particular there’s been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn’t yet have public profiles from following them.

Later today, Google will be rolling out these fixes to their features (quoted from their blog):

1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile

If you don’t want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can always opt out during the profile set-up when you first use Buzz or at any time from the edit profile page. We are making this option more prominent in the set up process, to ensure everyone who wanted to hide these lists can do so easily.

2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you

We are making it easier to block anyone, by adding “Block” links to the list of people following you. Previously, you were only able to block people from following you after they had created a public profile. Now, you can block anyone, regardless of whether or not they’ve already created profiles for themselves.

3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile

Initially, we showed you a list of all the people who would be following you once they created a public profile. However, only those contacts who had already created a public profile would show up on your public follower list. We’re making this clearer by explicitly distinguishing which of your followers have public profiles and will show in your public list of followers. With this change you’ll be able to see who is on the public list of followers that everyone else sees.

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