Life was pretty good last week for Google. The tech world was buzzing (HAAA!!) about its new social networking service, it acquired Aardvark to potentially make things even better, it announced its upcoming broadband efforts and it addressed some of the major issues with Nexus One. Then, when people actually started using Buzz, things went awry in Mountain View. 

As with the Nexus One, Google made it clear that it is a search engine company first and foremost, not a retailer, not a social networking company. While Buzz sounded convenient enough on the surface, there was one huge problem: in automatically searching through your Gmail contacts and adding some to the social networking element, it greatly trounced upon users’ privacy, bringing contacts to the forefront that users didn’t necessarily want brought–think abusive ex-spouses, mistresses, political dissidents, etc.

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