Buzz is dead. Google said Friday it was shutting down the social-networking product to focus on its new service, Google+.

Buzz had been launched in 2010 as the software giant's social-networking vehicle. But it quickly became embroiled in privacy issues that led to an investigation and settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and an international uproar.

'Learned a Lot' from Buzz

In a posting on The Official Google Blog, Vice President for Product Bradley Horowitz wrote Friday that Buzz and the Buzz API will be shut down within a few weeks. "We learned a lot from products like Buzz," he wrote, "and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+."

He said that while users "obviously won't be able to create new posts" with Buzz following the shutdown, they will be able to look at existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.

Buzz was built around the company's popular Gmail, and it enabled the sharing of updates, photos, videos and other material and information with friends. But it caused an uproar when the automated process revealed users' e-mail contacts and friends, without their permission. With Buzz, lists of friends were automatically created from Gmail contacts and most-frequent e-mail contacts, even though some might not be friends.

At the time of the controversy, the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Marc Rotenberg told The New York Times that there was concern that "Gmail users are being driven into a social-networking service that they didn't sign up for." Google said the auto-friend feature was intended to get people started.

40 Million Users

Buzz got the buzzer about privacy violations not only from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, but such other countries as France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

In a...

2011-10-15 07:24:38