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 !