Google Buzz was officially introduced on February 9, 2010 in the Official Google Blog. You can read the entire blog post on Google’s blog. To summarize, Google Buzz is Google’s answer to the increasing popularity of Facebook – particularly among younger Internet users. In fact a recent study released by Pew Internet and American Life project found that 73 percent of teens who are online use social networking sites. The study was based on a telephone survey of 800 people, aged 12 to 17, that was conducted from June to September of 2009. As Google previously had a miniscule presence in social networking, Buzz is another of the Google ”steps taken to add social features to our products”.

Google Buzz is built around the Gmail emailing platform. In fact, it is automatically built into Gmail retroactively for every single Gmail user. According to Google’s own description of the new product, ”Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works”. That may be true, buy I soon found that my work contacts – for instance the folks over at HostingCon or my friends at website hosting firm 34SP. com – were now viewing all my private contacts – that is, my family and friends private contact info. This was done without my knowledge or authorization by Google.

This automatic and retroactive nature of Google Buzz has immediately raised serious privacy concerns among Internet experts. In fact, one day after launching the service, experts at venerated online technology site CNET pointed out privacy concerns. There is no doubt that the Google Buzz service was turned on by Google without checking with each individual user. Therefore there are many users out there that do NOT want this new intrusive service added to their private email account.

But how do you turn Google Buzz off?

Although it is somewhat hidden, there is a mechanism to turn off Google Buzz. Here are the steps to turn it off.

To Turn Off Google Buzz

Step 1 – Sign in to your Gmail account with your username and password.

Step 2 – O
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n the left hand side of your Gmail interface (under the Gmail by Google logo) locate and click on the link that says: Buzz.

Step 3 – Scroll to the very bottom of the page and look for a line of text that looks like this:

Gmail view: standard | turn off chat | turn off buzz | older version | basic HTML Learn more

Step 4 – Click on ”turn off buzz”.

Google Buzz is now turned off. If you do decide that you want to turn Google Buzz back on – simply go to the bottom of your Gmail account and find the same line of text as before. It will now look like this:

Gmail view: standard | turn off chat | turn on buzz | older version | basic HTML Learn more

Select ”turn on buzz” to re-activate the Buzz service.

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