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Wizards of the Coast has new social network for gamers, The Wizards Community.

While before, I have had no use for WOC and hated them for their insidious product Magic: The Gathering–the scourge of my college days–its seems my opinion may have to change.  With its new social network, at long last I can find a group to play in.  Meetup.com also does gaming, and was my site of choice to look for folks, but I’ve found their selection of groups to be rather hit or miss; and the need to pay to organize a group–while understandable–was a bit of a barrier for me.

Google Buzz is the hip new thing, and is being met with a mixture of puzzlement over its function and outrage over its perceived privacy problems.  Things are hopefully being fixed but for the moment, the big issue is the viability of the  following/follower lists.

The whole thing is tricky to follow when you get down to the whole opt-in/opt-out social network function, so I made a couple of examples.

In the ideal world, this is how it should work.

Famous rock star and social activist Zoe has a Buzz feed.  Dave and Sue are huge fans of Zoe and want to know whom Zoe listens to, so they check out Zoe’s Following list and find some cool and interesting folks.

It is kind of like Twitter, you might say, and people follow other people on Twitter all the time, right?  The big problem is, Buzz makes your contacts and their emails addresses into an ad-hoc public social network–whether you want them to or not.  Buzz starts with users automatically agreeing to share their data in an opt-out rather than opt-in privacy policy and setting users up with an automatically suggested list of followers.  I may email my boss or landlord a lot, that doesn’t mean I want to be their Buzz-Buddy.

Bob might not have a Google Profile set up or have activated his own Buzz; but if Alice has mailed him, chatted with him via Google Chat, or contacted Bob in some other way Carol, Charlie, and Dave could look at Alice’s Following list and see that Bob (and his email address) was there.  Alice also mails Isaac, and now his email address is out there for the world to see–the problem, Isaac is Alice’s twelve-year-old son.

In the online world email address are almost like the magical True Names of old.  Know someone’s user name and a world of data unlocks.  People leak a tremendous amount of data around online, and spilling the beans on an email address can lead to unpleasant side effects.  I’m not one to assume malice lurks everywhere, odds are nothing will happen.  However, it is possible something can happen.

Ultimately, I think Buzz can be useful, but for the moment, it needs a lot of work.

For the moment here is how to hide your followers/ Following.

If you do not want your contacts to be a matter of public record, you can hide your following/follower list by going to your Google Profile, choosing Edit Profile, and unchecking the Display the list of people I’m following and people following me box.

Some Helpful Links

• PC World has a fairly good article on controlling Google Buzz
• Google has published a set of user controls for Buzz

If you want to chuck the whole thing here is how to turn it off.
Turning Buzz off

1. Delete your Google profile. Here’s how.
2. Block all of the people following you. Here’s how.
3. Turn off Buzz at the bottom of Gmail. Here’s how.

Its no lie, I love to talk.  At this point I would say I have 6 or more instant messenger IDs, and now  Facebook has a chat system too!

Thankfully I have been able to manage them through the wonderful open source program Pidgin. There now is a plugin for Pidgin that allows people to login and chat with people who are currently signed into Facebook. You can also see their profile picture and their status as well.

The download is located here:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

Windows users should use and install the .exe file.  Ubuntu users should use the .deb file and install.

Once you have installed the plugin, open Pidgin and simply just add your Facebook account.   For your login, put in the email you use for Facebook and your password.  There are some settings in the ‘advanced’ tab that you can configure when your setting up your Facebook account in pidgin, such as having your pidgin status be your Facebook status, whether you want new Facebook notifications to show up as emails in Pidgin, etc etc. Configure them to your liking, and chat away!

See you on the site!