This led to a number of lawsuits, as well as a Federal Trade Commission investigation over what were called "deceptive privacy practices" surrounding the way in which Buzz was implemented.

The FTC and Google have finally reached a settlement, both parties have just announced.

Google has faced multiple inquiries in various European nations about its data collection and transfer practices, most notably around Google Street View.

The privacy concerns around Buzz stemmed from the lack of clarity around the service's launch. When the feature was made available, it wasn't clear to users that they were going to be enrolled. Users were given the option to skip joining Buzz - or so it seemed since the choices were "Nah, go to my inbox" and "Turn Off Buzz." But according to the FTC, "Google misrepresentated that consumers who clicked on these options would not be enrolled in Buzz. In fact, they were enrolled in certain features..."

Google now says that users will have to give "affirmative consent" before the company is allowed to change how it shares their personal information. In announcing the settlement this morning, Google apologized and insisted it is "100 percent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward."

While those policies will involve all Google products and services, the impact on Buzz may be small as, despite great hoopla on that original launch date last February, the tool seems to have been a non-starter.

TweetDeck for Android will handle more than Twitter, bringing the ability to post and receive updates from Facebook, Buzz and Foursquare as well.

We've tried to innovate as much as possible to deliver a smooth, clean experience while offering more power than any other social mobile client. Updates from all services are viewable in blended Home and Me columns so you can easily keep up-to-date without a lot of jumping around. We've also strived to take what has made TweetDeck a great Twitter client and provide that level of support to the other services.

Just yesterday, the company shared a couple of infographics to demonstrate just what they were up against in developing the Android app. If you don't feel like clicking, the long and short of it is a fragmented Android ecosystem, both in OS and device, that makes it difficult to read in a pie chart.

If you've been waiting for TweetDeck for Android to arrive, take a look at the intro video below and give it a download by searching for "TweetDeck" in the Android Market on your phone.

The update is just for the standard desktop client, not the "super-swanky User Streams Preview version", but TweetDeck promises an upgrade for that is also on the way soon.

Two of our favorite new features, however, are "smart cross-posting for longer tweets" and support for t.co, Twitter's new URL shortener that is about to become the default across the network.

If you want to post an update that's longer than Twitter's 140 character limit, TweetDeck will let you, as long as you have a Google Buzz account. It will automatically truncate your update to 140 characters and include a link to the full text on your Buzz account. The only thing we wish here is that it would do the same with Facebook, instead. As for t.co, hovering your mouse pointer over a shortened link will now show the destination URL, taking away the mystery of clicking on a shortened URL.

In addition to all of those, TweetDeck has also added the ability to post photos directly to Posterous - a much requested feature - and support for logging in using a TweetDeck account, which helps to automatically add your accounts if you ever need to re-install.

A full list of additions and bug-fixes is available in the full changelog.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

When you first sign up for miio, you can search for friends across your social networks and email accounts or you can skip that step and just search for other miio users who share your interests. This is perhaps the key feature in miio that differentiates it from many other social networks: it's not yet another site where you have to (either manually or automatically) re-create your social graph. It's a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Now whether you're supposed to chat them up or hit on them when you meet them is something I wasn't too clear about, given that miio asks for your "relationship status" and what you're "looking for" (friends, dating, chatting, "whatever") via your profile page. Those seem like features borrowed from Facebook, and frankly, if miio just wants to be discussion site, it could do without them.

Miio's Twitter-Like Dashboard

The miio Dashboard is reminiscent of Twitter, with its "replies" and "messages to me," the latter very much like Twitter's own DMs (direct messages). But unlike Twitter, you don't just follow tweets, err...posts, limited to 140 characters or less. Users can write as much as they want. And like Facebook, those status updates can be links, photos, videos, etc. as well. They can also be questions, which then puts miio up against Q&A sites like Quora, for example.

Miio RSS

In fact, updates can even be RSS feeds thanks to a profile setting which lets you publish RSS to miio. Already a number of "members" have created miio accounts with RSS feeds - as you can see here by searching for *rss*. However, given the high profile nature of some of these accounts (ABC, AP, BBC, CBS, Huffington Post, etc.), it looks like miio created these accounts itself for others to follow, which is actually a handy feature.

From the Public Timeline or Search page, you can filter out whether or not you want to see RSS updates or whether you want to see just text updates, just photos, just videos, just questions and so on. If you switch the setting to "RSS only," miio could effectively function as a lightweight RSS reader for those who don't really do RSS.

Miio Groups

There are also groups within miio, where you can discuss items of interest to you whether that's sports or iPads. But given miio's "early adopter" mindshare, the biggest groups seem to be tech-focused ones like those discussing iOS, startups or even miio competitor Google Buzz.

Final Thoughts: Too Much of a Good Thing, miio Needs to Diet

Although miio gets some things right, simplicity is not one of them. It's not clear yet what exactly miio wants to be when it grows up, why there's a need for this service and who should use it.

Our advice to miio, ditch the advanced feature set (it's overwhelming!) and focus on doing just one thing and doing it well. Groups, perhaps. Google Buzz lacks a "groups" feature and although FriendFeed has them, that service lost quite a few members after its Facebook acquisition. Do discussion groups and do them better than anyone else. And don't allow top followed members to dominate discussions like on Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and every other "social" service out there today. Make it more democratic.

And simplify, simplify, simplify. Twitter worked because it was basic and easy. That's how miio should start too. It can add in advanced filtering, location-based services, metadata and all the rest later on, if necessary. (Or perhaps not at all).

With a redirected singular goal like this, miio could have a chance at attracting not just the tech geeks who sign up for anything shiny and new but those who just like to go online and chat about things they're into, no matter what those may be. Obviously, the folks behind miio have the technical know-how to build a great service, now they just need to establish a sharper focus. Good luck, miio!

Just like on Twitter, whenever you re-share a post on Buzz, the software will create a new post in your stream. You can choose whether you want to share this post with all your followers or just with a select group of your friends. It's important to note that this new feature will only work for public posts. Private posts in Buzz will not have the Reshare link.

Instead of editing a re-shared post like you can with Twitter's old retweet method, Buzz allows you to add a note to the post, but you can't edit the original.

As Todd Jackson, Google's product manager for Gmail and Buzz, told us yesterday, the Buzz team decided that creating a new post and forking the conversation was the best way to go for now in order to give people the ability to have more focused and intimate discussions around shared items.

One interesting aspect of this new feature is that all the re-sharers' names will appear on the original item, even if they are not connected to the original author. According to Jackson, Google decided to design this feature this way in order to allow users to find new and interesting people on Buzz.

Time to Give Buzz Another Try?

In our conversation, Jackson stressed the fact that the Buzz team has been listening closely to its users' feedback and has introduced at least one new feature per week since Buzz launched in February. These updates range from better controls for Buzz in your inbox, to improved comment collapsing and the ability to disable comments. We have been very critical of Buzz in the past, but it is clear that Google is working hard to improve the product, and this constant stream of new features has already made Buzz a lot more fun to use.

In addition, Google invited thousands of Buzz users to take new features for a test drive before they were launched publicly. While we can't tell you what these features are (everybody on the tester list is under a NDA), it is obvious that Google learned its lessons after the privacy debacle that followed the Buzz launch and is now actively soliciting feedback from a very diverse group of testers.

A visit to Vineub.com satisfied my curiosity, though. It appears that Vinehub is a new social network aggregation application, in the same line as FriendFeed or even Buzz itself, except with one major difference: it doesn't just pull in updates for liking and commenting, it sends them out too.

After testing the application, I can see why it wasn't included on Google's list. Vinehub is clearly still in beta. In fact, they should probably call it alpha, based on my experiences.

The service currently supports adding Facebook and Twitter accounts - at this point, the only Buzz integration offered is the addition of a "Buzz This" button on posts.

After announcing a partnership with the on-demand data center and hosting services company NetDepot in November, a press release went out promising MySpace integration, too, but that doesn't appear to have launched yet.

It took me four different tries over the course of two days to finally get the Facebook account added to my stream. For whatever reason, it simply would not take. I had to remove the application's Facebook permissions and the re-add my account again and again before it finally worked.

When at last I managed to get Facebook messages to appear in my stream, the "like" and "comment" buttons beneath the status messages were un-clickable. That is, I could click them, but nothing happened - I was simply redirected back up to the top of the page. Another feature that wasn't ready for primetime, it appears.

Some Facebook messages came in entirely blank, only showing an avatar, name and date.

On the other hand, Twitter functionality (reply and retweet) did work.

Could be Great, Too Soon to Tell

However, pre-judging Vinehub now based on these issues would be unfair. It's obvious that the service is still actively being developed, and isn't ready yet for everyday use. In fact, some of the links at the top of the Vinehub homepage don't even work yet - they display a "coming soon" message when clicked. Plus, the support email address is also non-functional - an email I sent them for more information was kicked back.

That said, the promised functionality is appealing. Instead of simply aggregating your networks like FriendFeed and Buzz do, Vinehub wants you to be able to post back to them and use the essential features they offer, including replies and retweets on Twitter, commenting and liking on Facebook and "buzzing" posts from one network to the next. In the future, the company plans to offer more functionality, too, including editing profiles, viewing friends' updates, viewing and sharing photos and adding contacts.

Another feature in the works is a pro-level account which will allow business and power users an ad-free version of Vinehub with up to 5 accounts per social network. That could be handy for those tasked with keeping track of the social media efforts within an organization. But today, there are several far more robust Twitter clients like CoTweet and HootSuite which offer more features than Vinehub. In its present form, Vinehub doesn't even come close to competing with those services. Unless Vinehub can ramp up its offerings to be on par with what's already out there, it will have a hard time gaining business users, despite the other services it offers.

Again, though, it's too soon to tell what kind of application Vinehub will be - it has to get built first. In the meantime, we'll definitely keep our eye on it, both on the site and via Twitter.

The app has also added support for location, including geotagged Tweets, Buzz entries and Foursquare updates. By adding their Foursquare account to a column within TweetDeck, users will be able to view their friends' location-based updates, as well as visualize their locations with an embedded Google Map within the column. Additionally, Twitter-compatible APIs may also be added, allowing the client to interact with services like Tumblr, WordPress and StatusNet.

Rich media will also be given a front-row seat in the latest release, as uploading and recording videos to 12seconds or TwitVid is integrated into the client. Updates can also be scheduled for a later date and time, and global filters will let users automatically remove feed entries across all columns based on any terms. This latest release will also provide users with the ability to incorporate their own custom URL shortening service.

After a quick test of a pre-release of the latest version of the app, I found that the Buzz and Foursquare integration worked smoothly. When trying to add a Twitter-compatible API, WordPress failed to sync up but Tumblr was successful. I was able to publish text entries on Tumblr, but adding photos or videos did not seem to transfer the way I had hoped they would.

With this update TweetDeck is taking enormous steps toward becoming a complete social dashboard - at least on the desktop. To be honest, I had largely given up on the app because of the sluggish feel of Adobe Air applications, but the integration of Foursquare, Buzz and other services may just draw me back to it. The securing of additional funding means we can expect only bigger and better things from the company in the near future.

Google is taking the earlier privacy concerns surrounding Buzz to heart with their API releases today, making sure to note the control users will have over which applications can access which data. When an application wants to access the Buzz API, users will be taken to a page where they can determine which level of access they want to grant the app.

The Google Code Blog outlined the features the API currently supports today, including "support for fetching public per-user activity feeds, fetching authorized and authenticated per-user activity feeds, [...] searching over public updates, [...] posting new updates, [...] posting comments, liking updates, retrieving and updating profiles and social graphs, and more."

Will a Buzz API give the service a much-needed shot in the arm and help ease its earlier privacy concerns? Only time will tell, but it seems like an open invitation to develop third-party applications is a wise and logical next step.

Granted, I use them as much as anyone else - including the one in this cartoon. But man, it's nice to speak English again... even if it's just for a while.

More Noise to Signal.

According to a blog post that will go up on the Gmail blog in the afternoon today, Google wants to ensure that even those users who joined Buzz long before Buzz automatically added people's email and chat contacts to their social networks will see these changes. After all, not every Buzz users kept up with the day-to-day news about Buzz after the launch and many of these users are probably unaware of the changes Google has made since then.

The confirmation screen will include a link to a video that explains how Buzz works, a list of all the people you are following and who are following you. There will also be a switch that allows you to turn off the list of people you are following on your public Google profile, as well as a link to all the your sites and services that are currently connected to Buzz. At the bottom of the page, users will then be able to either accept these settings or turn off Buzz altogether.

Google Buzz never caught on with mainstream users, even though Google pushed Buzz into every Gmail user's accounts. There are obviously still some major usability issues around Buzz and most Gmail users who see Buzz for the first time aren't likely to even understand the basic ideas behind Buzz.

The concept of Buzz - while immediately clear to anybody who ever used FriendFeed - is relatively novel. Google also never did a good job at explaining Buzz to new users and unless the company starts to make Buzz easier to use and explains its features to new users, Buzz will remain a niche product. Right now, even figuring out how to import content from third-party sites is way to hard.

Are You Still Using Google Buzz?

Popurl's Thomas Marban took a closer look at the content on Buzz today and found that "the most commonly published links [on public Buzz streams] only included the usual suspects such as Facebook, Foursquare and other social media spam."

Marban's experience mirrors our own and that of quite a few of the people we have talked to. What's your experience with Buzz? Are you still using it? Or did you forget about it after the early rush of excitement? Did you turn Buzz off after all the privacy issues became known? Are any of your non-geek friends ever use it? Let us know in the comments.

Google Buzz: Privacy Fail

Looking at the example of Google Buzz, which she called a "privacy fail," Boyd argued that Google didn't do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had.

Google's mistakes:

• Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world.
• Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn't want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz.
• Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to.

To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don't necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups.

It's also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there - while you don't expect others to be there - and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends.

Facebook's Privacy Fail

Users generally don't handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was "everyone." People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn't understand the privacy settings.

Public by Default, Private by Effort

By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences - something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators.

The Public-By-Default Environment is Not the Great Democratizer

Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn't mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook's news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place.

What Can Developers Do?

• There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users.
• Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn't mean they want to be seen.
• Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up.

Features

• Receive messages from the people you follow
• Comment on messages and mark them as liked
• Browse all links and images attached to messages
• Manage your followers
• Browse the people following you
• Find new people to follow
• Check the places around you and buzz about them

Posting to Buzz

Posting to Buzz from Buzzie is as easy as hitting the compose button, choosing if you want to attach your location to the post and hitting "send." You can use the app to send both private and public messages.

One feature that is missing here, however, is the ability to attach photos and links. Sadly, you can't set any defaults for the editor, which means that - by default - it always wants to attach your location, for example.

Photos and Links

The app handles posts with photos beautifully. You just tap on the photos and they appear in full-screen mode. Photo sharing is one of Buzz's best features and this app rightfully puts a lot of emphasis on making the photo browsing experience as seamless as possible.

The way the app handles links takes some getting used to, though.Instead of just tapping on the link, you have to push the little paperclip icon at the bottom of the screen. That's not a deal breaker, but it will surely confuse some people.

Verdict

Google is betting on HTML5 and web apps to deliver its products without having to go through the App Store approval process. Buzzie, however, shows that there are still some clear advantages to developing a native app. The app just feels a lot snappier than Google's web app for Buzz and even though it doesn't offer any new features, it makes using Buzz on the iPhone a lot more fun. A few features - like attaching photos to your posts or browsing the map for messages - are still missing, though chances are that the developers will add these in one of the next revisions.

Hat tip to The Next Web for spotting the app first.

Tweetmeme had similar beginnings and is now quite an impressive little company. Google Buzz has a lot of potential, and Buzzr is worth watching too.

Buzzr has taken a page out of Tweetmeme's book by prominently featuring a website button to share a story on Buzz, something that put the interests of publishers, users and Tweetmeme all in sync for that company.

On the other hand, there is a whole lot of backlash already concerning Buzz's intrusiveness. That's why we decided not to push content there automatically but to engage in conversations there instead. If that's how the medium shapes up then services like Buzzr may not be as widely embraced as the number-pumping Tweetmeme has been.

Time will tell; since Google Buzz's most disruptive quality is its open data standards, there should be a whole lot of services built on top of it soon.

The first tool we discovered (and one I use myself) is a web app from the creator of Reader2Twitter, the tool that automatically syncs Google Reader Shared Items to Twitter. His new Buzz sync service, Buzz2Twitter, uses the pubsubhubbub protocol so that the synchronization between the two services occurs in real-time. However, in our tests, there were some delays which the developer attributed to the particular pubsub hub he was using at the time.

The other features of Buzz2Twitter include:

• The ability to bind your bit.ly account to the service for link shortening
• The ability to format your synced tweets

For a longer review of Buzz2Twitter, check out Louis Gray's post.

2) Buzz Can Tweet

The second service we came across that allows for Buzz to Twitter synchronization is Buzz Can Tweet. This service takes a slightly different approach than Buzz2Twitter. Instead of syncing the exact text from your Buzz update over to Twitter, Buzz Can Tweet syncs your Buzz post with a link that directs your Twitter followers back to your Buzz update itself. This is especially handy for Buzz posts that are longer than the allowed 140 characters available in Twitter. If you're looking to encourage more discussion over on your Google Buzz profile, this may be the tool you want to chose.

In addition to bit.ly integration, Buzz Can Tweet offers a few more customization options, too, including:

• Selective tweeting - that is, only tweet buzz with keyword #twitter (customizable)
• Exclude text after keyword (customizable)
• No link back to Buzz when under 140 characters (customizable)
• Access settings via the control panel.

Those are the only two services we've found so far that integrate this often-requested functionality with Buzz. In the future, the Google Buzz team plans to offer Twitter synchronization as an option, but for now, they have to focus on bug-fixing and design issues. When all the glaring issues have been addressed, they can then worry about adding new features. (In other words, it may be a while!)

If you've tried either of the services above, let us know about your experiences in the comments.