Following blogs

I've just realised that clicking "Follow" on other people's blogs adds them to my Google Reader subscriptions - for some reason I thought that would be something different.

I think I was a bit confused about what "following" meant in the Google world because I read an article recently complaining that Google have set up something called Buzz - which automatically creates a public profile including information about who you "follow" - which is determined by who you most often exchange emails with. The main issue is that it makes private information public without requiring the person to actually do anything - you can opt-out if you choose, but if you do nothing the default is that the information about who you email is made public in the form of a list of people you are "following". They have since changed this: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189329/google_apologizes_for_buzz_privacy_issues.html

This does raise interesting issues about social networking generally, and the relationships between the different kinds of tools we use. There's been a blurring of personal and professional, public and private information, and a lot of it seems to happen because the software is available rather than because people actually want it. In particular having all of these tools owned by one company - so that Google has access to a whole range of information and can choose to combine different data sets - blurs everything even more, so that people have much less control over their information. Google's main intention seems to be to make everything as automated as possible - they are very good at predicting what you are looking for and finding it for you, so that you don't have to do much work. But removing the work also often involves removing the control and the choices, as with this "Buzz" feature which saves people the effort of choosing which information they want to be made publically available.