.::REALITYRECALL::.

Whether you call it a huge privacy flaw or just an annoyance, Google Buzz can put the contacts you automatically follow—a.k.a. those you most frequently email or chat—on a public profile page. Here's how to undo that.

Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen felt he had to avoid following certain Buzz contacts, as he didn't want to expose his social circle to the wider net. He's right—if you have a Google Profile, once you set up Buzz, those you’re following, and those following you, are shown on your profile page in a right-hand link list.

Update: This might not apply if you haven’t touched much inside Buzz, or haven’t set up a Google Profile, or that Profile is set to be hidden from the public. If so, you’re mostly in the clear. But keep in mind that, once you post to Buzz, your profile will likely be created, and you’ll want to know what’s getting put up on the web.

To turn this off, sign into your Google account (via Gmail or elsewhere) and head to your Google profile—that link should work if you're signed in. Look for the two links showing "Following X people" and "X people following me." There's a gray note underneath those numbers, indicating whether they're visible to just you or to everyone.

If they're visible to everyone, hit the "Edit Profile" link on the right-hand edge of the blue bar in the middle of the page, to the right of "About me," "Buzz," and "Contact info." In the third column of options there, there are checkboxes that control privacy features, and one of them is labeled "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me." Un-check that box, and now your list of followers and followees is private—or at least seen only by those you're following, perhaps.

Want Google Buzz gone entirely? Log into Gmail, then look at the bottom of your inbox page for a “Turn off Buzz” link. If you’re mainly annoyed at Buzz’s constant, um, buzzing, read up on removing Buzz updates from your inbox.

This tip came courtesy of Contributing Editor Lisa, who was similarly shocked to see Google dropping everyone’s frequently-contacted names on the net. If you’ve found a similarly crucial privacy tweak for Buzz, tell us about it in the comments.

When you join Google Buzz, it automatically provides you with followers and followees based on prior communication. These people are then listed on your Google profile, which can be seen by all your friends. So, affair havers: maybe hold off.

A lot of the Giz staff was alarmed by the suggested/automatic follower lists, not because they were automatic, but because it was hard to tell how exactly they were chosen. Obvious additions, like girlfriends or coworkers, seem to make the cut. Other entries were people that were rarely—and sometimes never—emailed from the associated account.

Anyway, point is, it’s an odd concept, made odder by the fact that, as the Silicon Alley Insider noticed, other people can see you’re following, including the auto-adds. To put this in real terms:

• A girl you slept with in college sends you a message on Gchat, to tell you she has five beautiful children now, and that she doesn’t ever think about you, ever. Ok!
• You exchange some messages and a couple emails to be polite. You defuse the situation. You don’t mention it to your current girlfriend, because that would be weird.
• Coincidentally, you enable Google Buzz, which adds both your current girlfriend and this lady who you politely deflected.
• Your girlfriend checks out your Google profile, sees your friends list, and asks you who that lady is.
• You clumsily try to explain, “Oh, it just adds people you talk to automatically,” which only makes things worse.
• Fight!
• …
• You break up, which was probably a good thing anyway, because your relationship sounded really unhealthy. But you get the point, right?

Since fixing this is as simple as toggling a privacy switch in your profile, it’s less of a disastrous bug than it is an unfortunate default behavior, and despite their early insistence that this is a feature, not a flaw, Google will probably adjust accordingly. Still though, Buzz hasn’t gotten off to the greatest start, has it? [Silicon Alley Insider]

YouTube has introduced an optional "Safety Mode" filter designed to help users screen out potentially objectionable content.

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"An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence such as a political protest or war coverage," explained Google spokesperson Jamie Davidson.

"While no filter is 100 percent perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site."

However, Sarah Perez of Read Write Web criticized the new filter, claiming that it failed to offer sufficient protection against the viewing of inappropriate content.

"Even if it's switched it on for a particular user account, the user can switch it off again just by scrolling to the bottom of the page," opined Perez.

"It may have been better if YouTube had introduced special ‘kid accounts’ which forced users on a particular computer to sign in in order to see YouTube videos. Once enabled on a PC, visitors to YouTube could have been presented with a sign-in box, not the YouTube homepage."



According to Perez, the accounts would then be managed by parents empowered to enable and disable the filter at will. 



"Instead, the 'Safety Mode' feature looks as if it's an attempt to placate the FCC and worried parents while not actually providing a anything the average web-savvy kid couldn't figure out in 30 seconds flat.

"So parents, enable the filter if you must, but remember, no technology – and especially not this one – can serve as a replacement for actual parenting."

Part of being a good user and consumer is understanding how technology works, why we use it the way we do, and what the barrage of acronyms and PR jargon means. We’re here to help you make sense of it all and give you a better appreciation for how that pile of transistors, pixels, and antennas works together to deliver the conveniences of the modern world to your living room or office.

What is RSS?

RSS, most commonly expanded to “Really Simple Syndication“, is a way for frequently updated Web sites to publish content so it can easily be repeated and aggregated around the Web. These feeds, as they’re called, are most often associated with news sites and blogs, but almost every Web site offers them. RSS, along with its close cousin Atom, strips out many elements of a Web site and leaves only the text, images and, in some cases, the audio or video associated with an article. It uses the XML markup language, a document formatting standard used not only in Web pages, but in office documents like those of Office 2007, Open Office, and iWork. This makes it a lightweight way to pass around content

Continue reading RSS, The Web’s Most Underutilized Time Saver

Filed under: Columns, Google, Web

RSS, The Web’s Most Underutilized Time Saver originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google announced on Wednesday that it plans to create and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States.
The network connections will deliver Internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second with fiber direct to the home connections. Google says it plans to offer…

Microsoft has shared some new Windows Live Messenger stats, confirming that more than 300 million people in 76 countries and 48 languages use Messenger every month.
The Windows Live Social Networking team also shared individual statistics for country specific Messenger users but did not include the United States. Microsoft’s Jeff Kunins,…

Yesterday, Google announced their new social networking tool, Buzz.  The tool started going live yesterday but is slowly being rolled out to the masses that are using Gmail.  The service that many are calling a ‘Twitter killer’ operates in a similar fashion to Twitter, but the overall idea is much…

Google is updating its Street View service with increased coverage across Canada.

Microsoft said on Monday that users experiencing battery warnings from Windows 7 are by design.
Last week Neowin revealed reports of users receiving notifications that they should replace their laptop battery. The warning is triggered when a laptops BIOS detects a battery replacement is required. Windows 7 provides the following…

Windows 7 has a lot of neat new features (such as Aero Peek) that help you see what’s behind a window, but reader Verygoodyear shares a very simple, one-key solution for any Windows version that, surprisingly, is new to us.

When moving a window in Windows, if you move the window, keep your finger held down on the mouse and then press Esc, it puts it back where you got it from.

Some of you may have known about this before, but we were a little shocked when we read Verygoodyear's tip—it's perfect for checking what's going on behind the frontmost one without disrupting your window layout and you don't need to activate Aero Peek to do it. Were we just incredibly slow on the uptake on this one (it works all the way back to XP), or is this simple-but-useful shortcut new to you, as well? Let's hear it in the comments.

The youngest son of Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke was killed in a car accident in Indiana on Friday.

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is working on a full webmail system to replace their current messaging platform, including full POP and IMAP support and a customized @facebook.com e-mail address. The codename for the new system: Project Titan.

In the TechCrunch post, Arrington suggests that Facebook has been working towards a webmail service for some time, expanding their messaging platform to be searchable and allowing Facebook users to send messages directly to non-Facebook e-mail addresses. The site has also shown interest in giving its users a more accessible and more complete online identity with the recent implementation of personalized URLs and the proliferation of Facebook Connect login on third party sites.

Project Titan would take this effort a step further, giving users a personalized username@facebook.com e-mail address and letting them access it on Facebook itself or independently via POP and IMAP. Facebook already has 175 million people logging into their site each day, but adding a true webmail solution would be a strong step in their transformation from a centralized communications hub to a broader platform for staying connected online. [TechCrunch]

I wanted to let you know that on April 15, 2010 Microsoft will discontinue Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360. Our first step in this process will be to turn off auto-renewals for those members who only use Xbox LIVE on a v1 Xbox. While I can’t comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features. 

Xbox LIVE general manager Marc Whitten (Gamertag Notwen) has posted this letter to the community which provides additional context.

The best is yet to come, and we look forward to sharing more details in the near future.

The Atlanta Thrashers traded superstar captain Ilya Kovalchuk to the New Jersey Devils in a five-player blockbuster late Thursday.

Want a wall-sized satellite view of your neighborhood? A full-page street map of the town you’re visiting? Google Map Buddy, a free, portable map maker, grabs data from Google Maps and arranges it exactly how you want it.

When you un-zip and run Google Map Buddy, it asks you to choose your Google Map nationality, then opens a browser to let you search out the location you’re looking at. Once you get there, hit “Select area,” then draw a rectangle around the area you want to capture. After fine-tuning the zoom level and hitting “Create Map Image,” Map Buddy goes to work grabbing, tile by tile, your area’s map. It generates a generally high-resolution PNG of your area, and provides the individual map tiles to keep and arrange yourself into a larger grid, if you’d like.

The software itself can be described as "picky"—you have to "X" out any particular business or destination that pops up in a dialog box on the map, and after zooming in on the Google Map browser to your destination, Map Buddy asks you for a deeper zoom level than what you've already set. So it's not an elegant tool, exactly, but it does deliver the very printable, full-picture map of your destination.

Map Buddy is a free download for Windows systems only, and doesn’t require installation.

With advancements in touchscreen technology, people are rethinking how they interact with their devices. The days of using an external keyboard and a clumsy mouse could soon be long gone. According to Wired, a Portuguese company called Displax has created a thin, polymer film that can be peeled and stuck onto glass, plastic or wood surfaces — transforming basically anything (opaque or transparent, round or flat) into an interactive touchscreen.

The film is about 100-microns thick (i.e., really, really, thin), is equipped with a grid of nanowires, can measure anywhere from 3- to 120-inches diagonally, and, most impressively, can detect movement from up to 16 fingers at once on a 50-inch screen. To do so, the film uses a technology similar to what’s used on the iPhone; which, as you probably know, is pretty darn responsive to touch. But Displax’s film can do something that even the iPhone’s screen can’t. It can detect your breath (although we’re not sure why you’d want to interact with something by blowing on a screen).

Continue reading Thin New Film Turns Anything into a Touchscreen

Filed under: Computers

Thin New Film Turns Anything into a Touchscreen originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen a black-and-white Iron Man MacBook decal before, but this full-color one is much more striking. Although you’ve gotta be OK with equating Apple’s logo with the powers of a superhero. Fanboys. Buy one here: [Etsy via Geeky Gadgets]

The Calgary Flames traded Olli Jokinen and Brandon Prust to the New York Rangers for fellow forwards Ales Kotalik and Christopher Higgins late Monday.