Goodbye, Google Buzz. The social messaging platform, which was meant to rival Twitter, is being tossed aside by Google in an effort to slim down.

Google Buzz launched in February 2010 as a way to share status updates, photos, videos, and links with friends through Gmail. The secret sauce was a "page rank" algorithm that determined which status updates should be featured prominently and which ones should be collapsed. Google Buzz also mined users' Gmail contacts and set users up to automatically follow the people they e-mailed most.

Unfortunately for Google, this turned out to be a privacy nightmare. By default, users' follower lists were public, revealing their most frequent e-mail contacts to the world. Google Buzz also lacked a way to block people who didn't have public profiles at first.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/241965/goog...s_the_dust.html