30 March 2010 | Author: J. Cave SEO Consultant

Privacy concerns abuzz at the FTC

Ironically named given that very few people are still talking about, with the exception of maybe the FTC, Google Buzz is as Techcrunch noted "Getting smoked in the sharing race by a dead man". Essentially what that means is that Google's attempts to become the next Twitter are not going too well.

While there was a little bit of a buzz about the service when it first launched, searchengineland show that - according to Chitika - all of that has now dried up.

One the day the service launched, Chitika saw around 1,500 searches that day for "Google Buzz" with searches for "Twitter" 15 times lower.

Unfortunately for Google, those searches quickly dropped off and only three days after Google Buzz had launched, the searches had dropped out of the three digits and were around 10 searches per day.

Back in February when the service first launched Quadszilla predicted on his blog "My guess is that no one but SEOs will use it. And then once SEOs figure out it's not effecting rankings, even they won't bother." He was pretty accurate.

Saying all of that, there is one group of people who are interested in Google Buzz and that is the privacy advocates. According to the Guardian, 11 congressmen have written to the FTC expressing concerns and urging the FTC to investigate complaints about Google Buzz. And Google Buzz isn't going to pretend things are all going swimmingly. A spokesperson for the internet giant said "When we realized that we'd unintentionally made many of our users unhappy, we moved quickly to make significant product improvements to address their concerns. Our door is always open to discuss additional ways to improve our products and services moving forward."

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