Google is a quick learner

Six weeks ago Google launched buzz, a social networking layer added to gmail. Buzz generated a lot of negative press with it’s default privacy settings and the paucity of privacy controls. Unless you are paranoid and follow the rule of not sharing anything with anyone that you don’t want everyone to know about, the set of people that you have ever exchanged email with is not going to be the same set of people that you wish to invite to view all of your online sharing.

Google listened to the feedback and made changes to Buzz, but not before it had lost any extra momentum gained from a surprise rollout. For many companies that would have been the end of it, but Google has shown that their corporate culture and structure are able to effectively transfer and make use of lessons learned from one project on another. I don’t think that it is possible to assign a high enough value to this characteristic, especially in a company as large as Google. I’ve worked at several companies that make the same mistakes over and over on project after project even though they have lessons learned presentations after each project. The culprit is often a corporate culture that seeks cover in making decisions the same way that they were made before. If your management chain thought that this was the right choice last time, then they can’t get too mad at you for making the same choice again.

This kills companies.

Last week Google added a content sharing layer to their bookmarking functionality. They nailed the privacy settings out of the gate. The privacy controls are simple and easy to understand and the default settings make sure that if you aren’t aware of the feature, you aren’t sharing anything with anyone.

Your main set of bookmarks is private. I could not find a method to change that in any way. You can create lists and add bookmarks to those lists. A list can be marked public so the world can see it, or it can be left private but explicitly shared only with whomever you choose. The UI is set up in such a way that there is never any ambiguity about who can see what. This is how Buzz should have been from day one, and I am amazed that a company of Google’s size was able to transfer that knowledge internally to inform another product launch in less than two months. Obviously someone with clout is taking personal responsibility to make sure that mistakes are not made again by anyone.

I am impressed.