Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Buzz is driving people crazy.....

....and not in the right way !

I open my google reader and noticed that I have a new follower. To find out who it was, I clicked on it and was surprised to see 'request sent' listed against some of my followers (as in, I have requested them if I could 'follow' them) and am surprised because I never did send those requests. While muttering unparliamentary words about Google, I go a google search (!) to find out if I am the only victim and lo ! there is a whole thread on this issue. I have copy-pasted some of the responses from that thread and have mellowed the 'swearing' !

I found out that I sent requests to follow people in my google reader, but I did not. Google reader, after installing buzz on my gmail, decided that I want to follow a bunch of people. I DO NOT. I want to cancel the "request sent" but I cannot. I am a professor in a university and I do not want to send requests to my students to follow them. This is a serious problem, and I do not understand how to stop this. I tried to disable my google reader completely, but could not find how. How can I solve this?

I would be completely flattered (or freaked out as the case may be) if I get a request from my professor but I would also be on guard because there are only certain things you write that you want your professor to read, right ?!

I had the same problem, which is what brought me to this forum. To undo it, I went into "Buzz" and basically just clicked "Unfollow" on every single person I was "following" there. (Even though Buzz never asks if I want to follow those people, either.) When I went back to Reader, I changed my shared settings to "protected". After I did this, I was basically following no one, and I had to re-check "follow" for the few people I do want to follow. F---ing headache.

Mental note: Check settings in Google Reader.

This whole thing was ridiculous. First, I clicked the "no thanks" to Buzz, but somehow, it's still turned on and running with my account. Then it makes me follow ANYONE that's sent me mail that has a gmail password, even people that only emailed once (like for an ebay transaction). Seriously Google, get with the f---ing program!

Another mental note: Remove one-time transaction ids from my contacts.

The funniest part is most of you will probably read this in Buzz ! Devil thy name is Google !

5 comments:

  1. It drove me crazy too... I realised it only after I sent out a few comments. Well finally I had to block all my followers and remove everyone I am following and finally shut "Buzz" off from my gmail.
    I never thought Google would do this. I am a big fan of Google's other things like the open office, the Google UI toolkit, online app server etc.,.. but I was appalled by this indifferent approach.

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  2. ya wanna tell shoo shoo buzz of google...dunno y google is trying so much to impress its users....

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  3. i m reading reading n reading ur blog...addicted to it...wntd to say a big thanks for ur cross referencings (s ter a word like tat)...saves hell lotta time..

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  4. @Deepak

    thanks :), yeah the word is cross-references.

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  5. amma appa post was too gud...dunno if it is cos of this month or cos of ur blog but i feel all mellowish (wel hope this word atleast exists :) )


    sorry for using this post to write abt the older ones

    ReplyDelete

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