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Google's Social Blowout

Last year's Buzz breakdown wasn't enough to deter a flood of social networkers from wanting to try Google+, the search leader's latest foray into social networking. Chief among Google+'s attractions is Circles, a feature that lets users easily sort their friends into different groups. Meanwhile, Amazon fights the taxman, the USSC strikes down a video game law, and MySpace gets the boot from News Corp.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) made a very socially awkward move with its rollout of Google Buzz last year. It was Google's attempt to build a social network in part by stringing together various existing pieces of its infrastructure -- your contacts from over here, your Gmail account over there, Google Reader if you use it, so on.

The problem with Buzz was that while it was shuffling around this complex network of acquaintances from different parts of your life, certain wires had a way of getting crossed. In the end, lots of people could potentially learn a few things about you that you may have rather kept private, or at least compartmentalized. Some of the specific privacy concerns users had could be fixed by wrenching around various account settings, but some of them were difficult to find and were set to open by default. The bottom line was that Buzz had boundary issues. It tried to get a little too friendly, and the backlash came on fast and furious.