danah boyd gave the opening keynote at SXSW this week looking at attitudes towards privacy and publicity. As her main example she used the recent fail by Google Buzz – a great way of demonstrating the disconnect between those making the technology and those using it.

She has made the full write up of her talk available online, and I recommend you have a read.

Like everyone, yesterday I got access to Google Buzz. And like most people, I’m scratching my head as to the whys and hows of it.

Personally, I really like the fact that it has mashed together bits of Google Wave (has anyone found a use for it yet?), Google Talk, and the comments feature of Google Reader. I like having a better way of viewing the comments on shared Google Reader articles, and as a lot of my contacts are fellow Gmail, I like having a group conversation space.

However, there’s are so many bad decisions to the product. The automatic opt in and auto follow feature is fraught. I ended up with a number of people following me who I had no idea who they were! It turns out they were people that I had contacted once in the process of making a purchase or contacting a help desk. Not people I wanted to keep in touch with! And the block option is not immediately obvious – you are required to actually view the persons profile and it’s in small, faint font there.

There there are the privacy issues which have been widely reported already. I certainly turned off the display followers option quicksmart.

The location features are interesting. I started using yesterday on my iPhone, and it automatically adds your current location (it wasn’t quite accurate for me, giving a street a few streets away). This is good for hyper local searches but it does open your buzz posts to the general public as one of my friends discovered this morning!

The forwarding of buzz comments to my inbox is slightly irritating. Why forward them there when the Buzz inbox is right below? It doesn’t make much sense. However this is at least fixed by setting up a filter to remove them straightaway.

Overall though, I don’t know that it will be something I continue to use. I already have twitter where I have group conversations (with the same people as on buzz), I already have the comments feature on Google Reader. I don’t really see a purpose for it as yet.

I will however keep using for a little while and see if I can find a place for it to fit.

Finally, Chrome has enabled extensions! I’ve pretty much exclusively been using chrome at home for about the past 6 months, but have been really noticing the lack of extensions. Especially the adblocker! I had gotten so used to using all the added features of Firefox that using chrome at first felt like taking giant steps backwards.

I will be watching with interest how the extensions progress and also keeping an eye out on how they affect the performance of Chrome. I am the kind of user who has a minimum of 20 tabs open at a time, so I’m very interested in seeing any performance issues.

As such, I’ve only put a few extensions on – the essentials as it were. Adblock, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter. Are there any extensions that are simply must haves that I’ve forgotten?

I was lucky enough to get an invitation to Google Wave the other day, so I have been having a bit of a play with it to see what it is like.

My first impressions were that is a glorified chat room. Which is unfair, but that’s how it felt. You can chat in realtime with your contacts, to the point of even seeing their text as they write it.

However, that aside, it does have some great collaboration features. You can edit messages, both your own and other’s, which is useful but at the moment it is hard to know what was edited. The authors details change to include the names of everyone who has edited that message, but there is currently no way of knowing what they edited or what the text was previously.

It does have potential as a collaboration tool. You can attach files and images to messages as well as maps and other gadgets such as a voting tool. There is also a Sudoku gadget you can play if you’re that way inclined!

Personally, I don’t have any use for it at the moment. I wish I had had access back when I was at university, and completing group assignment after group assignment. It might have made communication that much easier.

For now though, I will keep experimenting and watching with interest any changes they make.

And in more slightly creepy news, Google officially launched their Web History tool earlier this week. And whilst there is a certain cool factor in being able to see your web history no matter which computer you are on, I don’t know if I’m really entirely comfortable with it. Particularly when I can access my search history all the way back to 2005. I don’t recall signing up for that. (maybe I did? I’m not entirely sure how it works, and I am a terminal early adopter of things – so many accounts which I’ve signed up for and forgotten – that maybe I did say they could store all my search history without me knowing). And it certainly isn’t everything, cause I’ve definitely done more than the 600 or so searches it says I have in the last two years.

However, in light of the Google move on DoubleClick, and the subsequent complaint from US privacy groups, it might not be so unreasonable to worry about why Google might want to be tracking our search data. Thankfully, it’s easy to turn off, if you don’t want Google knowing too much about your buying habits, or you late night furtive searches, but it is something to bear in mind…