Google guesses who your friends are, including your mistress that your wife doesn’t know about (and then shows everyone this).

This is such an inexact science, because anyone can figure out your email address. We receive so much spam and other garbage through email account (is a shopping site really my friend?) and there are conversations you want private. Those connections are now public by default, as Gizmodo points out:

• A girl you slept with in college sends you a message on Gchat, to tell you she has five beautiful children now, and that she doesn’t ever think about you, ever. Ok!
• You exchange some messages and a couple emails to be polite. You defuse the situation. You don’t mention it to your current girlfriend, because that would be weird.
• Coincidentally, you enable Google Buzz, which adds both your current girlfriend and this lady who you politely deflected.
• Your girlfriend checks out your Google profile, sees your friends list, and asks you who that lady is.
• You clumsily try to explain, “Oh, it just adds people you talk to automatically,” which only makes things worse.
• Fight!
• You break up, which was probably a good thing anyway, because your relationship sounded really unhealthy. But you get the point, right?

The situation is so bad, some sites (like Lifehacker) are showing ways to turn off the contact list. Think about it — do you want every telemarketer to be your friend? Facebook has one important filter: you can deny friend requests.

It’s never, ever a good idea to create a social graph the way Google did. That’s why most of the IM clients do the double opt-in approach (and the follower model is killing Twutter).

Google Buzz reinforces the power law online, which means you’ll get to see 100 photos of Jason Calacanis’ dog, or promoting how he pays more than some services, but less than About.com for content

The people you want to talk to automatically become long tail, yet the people who are endlessly self promoting always bubble to the top because they have 11,000 followers, and someone’s always going to make a comment.

Social Customer points out buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations, and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have “new” comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online, and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interestingness in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces.

Not that many people use Gmail, and most who do are the digirati.

From twittercism:

This is also the first time I’ve noticed how few of my friends actually use Gmail. I loveGmail, and recommend it to everybody, but people are often quite set in their ways, and prefer to stay with Hotmail or Yahoo, irrespective of the lack of features. Looking at my address book, I’m guessing probably less than 20% of my friends have a Gmail address, or even a Google account, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s mad, but it also means Buzz is already limiting my network.

Social networking is an all or nothing game, and if you only have 20 percent of your friends, do you really think the other 50 percent or so are going to create a Gmail account to see Google Buzz?

I think not.

What’s the take away? Not ready for primetime.

I agree with twittercism:

My gut feeling? Unless they make some major changes and improvements to Buzz, and soon, and that includes addressing those privacy issues, it’s never going to be a threat to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just another aggregator. And a bad one, at that.

Everyone sees Facebook as the center of their social graph. They also see Google as the place that wants your information, which is why people won’t trust them with their social graph.

What do you think?

I know the guy posting this (Brian Salzman), and this is a great position. If you are looking to break in the field, this is a good place to start.

IBM in Costa Mesa, CA has an opening for a paid user experience intern. We are looking for students to start early in 2010 and to work for at least six months. We do not offer summer internships.

IBM interns join multidisciplinary product development teams to design, prototype, and evaluate graphical user interfaces for IBM’s industry-leading database, business intelligence, and content management products. Interns collaborate with user experience colleagues in Silicon Valley and around the world.

Applicants should have some combination of the following skills, experience, and personal characteristics:

Technical and Professional Skills

• Ability to learn new technologies quickly
• Familiar with graphical user interfaces and style guidelines
• Knowledge of User Centered Design methodologies
• User interface design experience
• Prototyping experience
• Usability evaluation experience
• Strong interest in Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Software Experience

• Software applications for Windows, UNIX or LINUX
• User Interface prototyping tools (Visio, Axure, Visual Basic, Photoshop, etc.)
• HTML, XML or Javascript
• BASIC, C++, Java or other programming languages

Essential Characteristics

• Adaptable and dependable
• Highly motivated and a self-starter
• A good communicator
• Works well in teams
• An innovative attitude

Education

Internship candidates must be enrolled in a degree program – Preferred candidates will be pursuing a graduate degree with an emphasis on human-computer interaction (HCI). To be competitive, candidates should have HCI coursework and user interface design experience (class projects OK).

Send a resume and cover letter listing HF/HCI courses, programming/prototyping experience, and user interface design experience to:

Brian Salzman
Email: jsalzma@us.ibm.com

Stephanie Bergman is a Social Media and Product Management consultant friend of mine. She’s very sharp, a good compass of where to go. Here’s her opinion of the iPad, and you can find her blog here. And yes, I’ll have my own opinion.

Earlier today, Apple announced the tablet computer the world has been waiting for. And it isn’t quite a tablet or a computer. It’s more of an entertainment device – a “third category” as Steve Jobs put it – and one I don’t really think the world needs.

I’ve never been really excited about the idea of a tablet, so I was biased from the start. A keyboard is pretty essential to me for anything, I type very fast and have no patience for anything that slows me down. That said, I was still curious to see what Apple was going to do beyond making a really big iPod Touch. I mean, this is Steve Jobs, I expect to see a paradigm shift, a massive step forward, a change in the way we do things. That’s where I’m disappointed.

The iPad is a big, expensive ($499 for the cheapest version without 3G), iPod touch.

The positive – there are going to be people who will love this thing (other than the usual Apple fan boys/girls). It’s gorgeous, and if beautiful design is your thing, you’re going to love using this. It’s a nice entertainment device, a decent size to watch television on, iPod, and a good ebook reader. If someone doesn’t have access to a television or other computer, this could fill that gap. Maybe someone with roommates or college students. Business folks will also love whipping this out in a meeting to do a presentation. Assuming, of course, that they don’t mind presenting in Keynote. It’s also going to open up an entirely new world of computer gaming as people innovate with the touch screen interface. Someone who travels a lot would like this as well (battery life is reportedly around 10 hours) – so long as they don’t mind using the screen to type, or carrying another laptop/netbook.

There definitely IS a use for this. I simply don’t think that now is the time for it. It won’t replace a computer – you can’t run Word or PowerPoint on it, you can’t even do something as simple as keep AIM open while surfing the web – and it isn’t a phone either. No camera, no GPS, no keyboard, no Flash. How many programs are you running on the machine you’re reading this post on? You couldn’t do that, it’s clearly not intended for work. This would have to be complimentary, an entertainment-focused device in addition to a computer and phone and a television…and that’s where it loses me. The costs don’t work out.

I’m not the average user, I know that. I have an iPhone, iPod, Netbook, Kindle, and Macbook Pro, and they all have different uses for me. I rarely watch videos online, that’s what the Roku and TiVo are for, and I like being able to curl up in bed with a kindle without having to worry about touching the screen or it rotating. I have absolutely no use for the iPad, it doesn’t offer me anything at all beyond what I already have.

Then there’s a name. Immediately after the presentation was over, the word iTampon was trending on Twitter. The name iPad was not. The jokes are never going to end (in fact, they started years ago), and it gives me crazy giggles to think that there’s an iPeriod app for the iPad.

The bottom line is – there is nothing revolutionary about this. It’s pretty, it’s cool, I’ll absolutely drool over it when I see it, but that’s about it. If any other company had announced this, I would have shrugged. But it’s Apple – I expect innovation, and there’s very little.

Oh well. But hey, it’s first gen. I’ll wait until next year for the brain implant.

Congrats, this is the 500th post on Usability Counts.

If you didn’t notice, I made a few changes on the site, and it was easy — I let the data do the changes based on site traffic.

This was based on a year of site traffic data through Google Analytics.

Removing the tag cloud

This is a conversation that I’ve had a few places.

I feel tag clouds are useless pieces of Web 2.0. Most executives think they make great demos. Users could care less.

Now I have the data behind the argument.

The highest tag from a page view perspective was requirements gathering, at 160 pages (39th highest request). After that it was usability (at 76). Silly Saturdays clocked in at 122.

Almost no traffic.

Tag cloud — gone.

Promoting content higher

A few posts, specifically Seven Reasons Why Agile And Scrum Works For Web User Experience which got thousands of views, I promoted to a new area for Top Posts. I’ll rotate posts through that region, but going through the data a few posts got a significant amount of traffic.

If users want to read certain content, they can have it!

Removing links

The links on the right generated almost no traffic, so I removed a lot of them. I do think it’s good to have some resources for users, but they’re more often than not clicking on them within the body of an article, not in a sidebar.

Links, gone!

How appropriate.

This paragraph says it all (From Freelance Review):

Let’s face it: freelancing is pretty great. No more dealing with annoying coworkers or shoveling your car out of a snow drift to get to work. What could be better than being your own boss? Well, at times, not being your own boss! As with every job, there are pros and cons that make up your daily list of responsibilities and obligations. Here is a list of the most common problems freelancers face and how to deal with them.

Read on…

The running joke is that you know something has jumped the shark once Corporate America has grabbed a hold of it.

Church of the Customer predicts that this is the year Social Media really starts becoming part of Corporate America. Boring isn’t necessarily bad, because it means it’s profitable.

My prediction for 2010: social gets integrated into business functions. That means: social media policies, aligning social media strategies and tactics with overall business objectives and revenue goals, and realigning functional teams. Yeah, not as exciting as another viral video but those are as reliable as a Vegas roulette table. Social media process is hard work, so it’s time for social media to get boring! For process geeks like me, that’s pretty exciting.