Google has just announced three tweaks to Buzz and, at the same time, offered an apology for what it calls a “challenging week”:

We quickly realized that we didn’t get everything quite right. We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We’ll continue to do so.

Here are the three changes announced today:

1. Auto-follow becomes auto-suggest. For new Buzz users, Google will not automatically set their account to follow the contacts they’ve emailed and chatted with in Gmail. Instead, Buzz will suggest people to follow — but with the entire list pre-selected, as shown in this image from Google’s blog post:

Google says this same interface will be made available to existing Buzz users “over the next couple weeks.”

2. Picasa and Google Reader won’t be connected to Buzz automatically.

3. New “Buzz” tab in Gmail settings. Google is adding a new tab to Gmail’s settings; this is where users will choose to show or hide follower/following lists, to include Buzz in the Gmail interface, or to disable Buzz completely. Doing the latter will delete all your Buzz posts and delete your Google Profile, too.

“It’s clear that interest in Buzz may extend beyond the current Gmail base, and we’re open to serving that community,” said Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Product Marketing, when I spoke to him about some Buzz issues at the TED Conference.

Horowitz stressed that Google would still offer a version of Buzz within Gmail, in addition to any independent version.

“We think that Buzz within Gmail is a great experience, and we’ll keep offering that as well,” Horowitz said.

Trademarks, “Big Names” & Buzz

One issue with Buzz is that it may be difficult for companies to have profiles that match their trademarks, or famous people might have similar issues. Indeed, anyone who is established on one social network may discover that their name on the new Google Buzz network is long gone, since Buzz uses names that are linked to Gmail accounts. (See The Giant Mess Of Mixing Gmail Addresses With Google Buzz/Profile Names for more about this).

By offering a version of Buzz separate from Gmail, Google could address some of these issues. Horowitz said that if an independent Buzz system was offered, existing profiles would likely redirect or work with new names that might be registered. There also might be a “landrush” similar to what Facebook did last year, when it allowed people to claim vanity URLs for their profiles. But Google doesn’t have exact plans, only an awareness that some people may want an independent service like this.

Horowitz said Buzz would also continue to ensure people could search and find the “right” people as well.

Buzz & Privacy

Meanwhile, there’s also the privacy issue. Since Buzz is tied to Gmail, people are forced to expose their Gmail address if they want ot have a profile URL that isn’t a string of numbers. And even if they don’t, it turns out there’s apparently still a way that Buzz can give away your Gmail address.

Beyond that, there are the concerns that by scanning through your contacts, Gmail may be exposing people to other privacy concerns by seeming to associate them to people they don’t particularly like or don’t want publicly known.

F*** You, Google is a good example of this, where Harriett Jacobs found that her ex-husband was listed as one of her followers. Some other stories on the privacy topic include:

• WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw
• Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare
• Google Buzz — and you thought Facebook had privacy issue

I’m an example in that last story, a screenshot showing how my exact location was revealed through my Buzz post. Yes, that’s a privacy concern. But in my case, I deliberately chose to reveal that address — I was testing out how that worked. Whenever you do a Buzz post on your phone, your location is suggested as something to post. But you can disable this on a per post basis — and I think (I haven’t had a chance to double-check) that location is never revealed by default.

In terms of how Google auto-followed people, there’s some suggestion that this has given those people access to information they wouldn’t ordinarily find. That’s not the case, to my understanding. Items that might automatically appear on Buzz from external sources were already public. Individual Buzz posts themselves are also public, by default. Followers don’t get any special access to Buzz content unless you choose to make some content within Buzz itself only available to a smaller group. The certainly don’t get access to your Gmail inbox.

Still, I think Google made a mistake in automatically following people and then making those people visible by default. Google tells me there were plenty of warnings this would happen. But for myself, because I first started through the mobile version, I just don’t recall these. The first time I saw my follower list was hours later after my account had been created.

Clearly I wasn’t alone in being confused. I think part of the problem is that this is much different than how things might work for something like Twitter. Yes, at Twitter, your followers will be shown by default. But no one is selected automatically for you — and when you do add someone, you effectively review each and every person.

At any rate, Google has responded quickly to some of the concerns raised this week. In a blog post Thursday, Buzz Product Manager Todd Jackson shared and explained three changes:

1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile
2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you
3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile

Some users and industry watchers are still unimpressed with Google’s changes. It may be that offering an independent version of Buzz may be Google’s best option to address these ongoing concerns.

Postscript: I’ve substantially updated this article since it first appeared. We never meant to suggest that Google would not ALSO offer a Gmail-linked service, but our headline may have given this impression. That was unintentional, and our apologies about that.

Our original story also suggested that the move of a separate service was being considered out of privacy concerns — that was a mistake, which we quickly corrected to clarify to stress that I’d been talking with Horowitz about the namespace issues.

In the interest of transparency, our original story is below:

Google: We May Remove Buzz From Gmail Content

In light of the substantial privacy concerns voiced this week about Google Buzz, the company says it may separate Buzz from Gmail.

Danny Sullivan has spoken with Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Product Marketing, about some of the Buzz issues at the TED Conference.

One key problem is that Buzz is linked with Gmail, causing some of the privacy issues being raised and also awareness about how brand owners deal with having their trademark terms being taken. (See The Giant Mess Of Mixing Gmail Addresses With Google Buzz/Profile Names on Buzz for more.)

By linking Buzz to Gmail, Google jumped to the conclusion that a user’s email contact book is the same as a social network. For many users, that’s not the case.

Horowitz said Google is considering separating Buzz from Gmail, so that people can participate independently from email. The company might also allow people on Buzz to claim new names and redirect anyone seeking them at their old profiles to the new locations. Horowitz says Google also continues to look at ensuring search is a good way for people to locate the “right” people, as well.

Google has responded quickly to some of the concerns raised this week. In a blog post Thursday, Buzz Product Manager Todd Jackson shared and explained three changes:

1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile
2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you
3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile

Some users and industry watchers are still unimpressed with Google’s changes. It may be that ending the marriage of Buzz and Gmail is Google’s best option to address these ongoing concerns.

Many will call this a Twitter killer or a threat to Facebook. Certainly the company is targeting the audiences that Twitter and Facebook serve, but suggestions that Buzz will kill them are overblown. From Orkut to Lively to Google Friend Connect and beyond, Google has tried to succeed with social products that just haven’t caught on. There’s no guarantee Google Buzz will be any different.

Google Buzz launches on two fronts, and Google has issued separate announcements for each: one on the Gmail blog and another on the Google Mobile blog. Here’s a quick look at how each one works, as well as more about Google Buzz in general.

Google Buzz In Gmail

Over the next couple days, Gmail users will start to see a new link, “Buzz,” right below the Inbox.

This is where you’ll see updates or Buzz posts from the people you follow. There’s nothing to sign up for or setup. If you use Gmail, you’re automatically following the people you email and chat with the most. Don’t use Gmail or don’t have contact there? We’ll get back to how to manually add people further below in this story.

Photos and videos shared by your contacts show up right in the Buzz interface. You can control who sees your own updates (the world or just your friends), and you can have Buzz display updates from other sites like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, or Google Reader. Just about all of that is already available in Yahoo’s version of social-meets-email that they announced last June, by the way.

Anything you share has its own URL, so that people can go directly to a particular post. If you mark a post as private, only people authorized by you to see that post can access the URL, and only if they’re signed into Buzz. Public posts, Google says, will be “indexed instantly” and may show up in Google’s real-time search results.

There’s a semi-risky feature that Google has added: Replies to your updates will show up in your Gmail inbox (as live conversations, not as static emails). I say it’s somewhat risky because this is the era of “Inbox zero” and I doubt that many users will want a lot of social chatter clogging up their inboxes.

One more potentially risky feature — one that’s born of Google’s love of algorithms — is that Buzz will also recommend updates/posts from people you don’t follow. Although there’s a “Not Interested” link with each one, this is another feature that may add more clutter than many users are willing to accept.

Google says Buzz will “weed out uninteresting posts from the people you follow,” and also says that it’s working to improve how it recommends the “most relevant conversations.” Also in the works are features specifically for business and education use inside of Google Apps.

Google Buzz In Mobile

Google has also launched a version of Buzz for mobile phones, and in this format it seems to have a more compelling value proposition. It comes in several flavors, or versions, with different access points.

1. Using buzz.google.com in an iPhone or Android-based browser offers more location-based information. So, in addition to seeing and sharing updates with friends, you’ll also be able to see a wider collection of public messages around you, including from people you don’t know, as well as updates that are specifically about a nearby location. This should be available soon after 11am Pacific Time today.

2. Google Maps for mobile offers a “Buzz layer” that shows updates/posts. You can also read or post updates on mobile Place Pages. This is available on Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and the iPhone.

3. The Google.com mobile home page has a Buzz icon in the upper right corner that will trigger a posting box. This also should be available after 11am today.

4. A voice shortcut lets users post updates without having to type. This is available in the quick search widget on Android and in the Google Mobile App on iPhones.

Buzz’s Foursquare-Like Nature & Google Places Pages

Foursquare is a location-based social sharing service that is growing in popularity. It allows people to locate where they are in relation to a business or place, then share that location — along with a short message if they like — with friends. They can also share tips about a particular place. Gowalla is a similar service, and Yelp recently adopted Fourquare-like features.

Buzz offers similar features. Those using their mobile phones to access the service can easily locate a particular “place” that’s nearby. Then when they post a Buzz update, their location will also be sent. They effectively “check in” to a place by making a comment.

Places in Buzz are linked to Google Place Pages that launched last September and which have steadily gained new features such as local reviews over time. (See our Google Place Pages archive for more background.) This means any post about a place made in Buzz will show up in a new area on Places Pages.

There is an option to hide your location, though that has to be selected manually. By default, Buzz tries to link your comments to a place. Unlike Foursquare, there’s no game element to Buzz. No one gets to be made “mayor” of a particular place, at least not yet.

Google Profile Pages & Adding Followers

All your public activity on Buzz will be visible through your Google Profile Page. People can access a feed of what you’ve been saying and see those you follow and are following, if you choose to share that. Yahoo already offers something similar.

Profile pages are also another way people can add those they wish to follow. Shortly, they should have a new option to follow someone on Buzz.

What if you want to add a lot of friends quickly but don’t use Gmail, so may lack the automatic network building it provides for Buzz users?

Ideally, you’d want to be able to import people you follow from other social networks, like Twitter. That’s not possible yet, but it might come.

Similarly, for those with existing Google Profiles, it already mines the public web to build out a social circle for you (see Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features). But right now, there’s no way to import that public network and leverage it to link you to others in your network who have profile pages. That’s something else that Google says may come.

Use Gmail but through your own domain, on Google Apps? That’s another place where Google says support will come. In the meantime, you can export your contacts from your mail account and import them into a Gmail account linked to a Google Profile.

How About A Buzz Client? How About Buzz Sans Gmail?

Many people participate in Twitter off the site itself, through third-party software clients on their desktop like Seesmic or Tweetdeck. Will Buzz provide a way for software makers to add Buzz to products like these? Yes, Google says — that type of functionality should be available in a few weeks.

What about those who just want to use Buzz on its own, on the web, rather than having it be part of Gmail. That’s also something that may come, Google says.

Final Thoughts

Gmail certainly has its share of dedicated, hardcore users — people who have Gmail set as their home page and keep it open all day in a separate browser tab. But do these users want social networking to invade their inbox? We’re all familiar with the challenge of separating work time — which almost always involves email — from “social time,” and Google is taking somewhat of a risk by combining the two with Buzz.

As I said above, I don’t see this as a Twitter or Facebook-killer. If anything, it seems like an attempt for Google to keep some of its own users from bothering to try Facebook or Twitter if they haven’t done so already — and it may succeed to some degree in that way. But I don’t see anything so new and innovative here that existing Facebook or Twitter users will be compelled to switch.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: I’ll add that while Buzz is clearly aimed at competing with Twitter and Facebook, Google’s at pains to stress that they see Buzz as essential to Google’s “organizing the world’s information” goal.

“The stream has become a torrent,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at Google, told me when we talked about Buzz. “This is not something we’re jumping on for the moment. It’s core to achieving our mission.”

Much like web pages became overwhelming, and where human categorization of them couldn’t keep up and got replaced by search algorithms, so Google sees social connections becoming overwhelming. That there is valuable information being shared socially, and Google’s job is to help people feel that’s organized.

Certainly Buzz allows Google to start having people create content within its own area, saving it from having to make deals with Twitter & Facebook (see Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter and Google & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals).

To me, the biggest challenge Buzz seems to face so far is that feels disorganized. It integrates with some Google products; it doesn’t integrate with others. It seems like an incomplete patchwork — plus it doesn’t really live yet as its own standalone product.

Of course, Horowitz was clear that Buzz is a starting point, a product they wanted to get out now, to mature it with public feedback.

I’ll have more thoughts on the product in a few days, after I’ve had a chance to play with it more.

NOTE: Google Buzz Is Now Live. See our detailed post, Google Buzz: Google Takes On Twitter, Facebook & Even Foursquare.

While Twitter is all abuzz over the news, this is something that Yahoo Mail has offered its 300 million users since last June. Yahoo, in fact, offers status updates across a wide variety of its properties.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google may announce the new feature this week. The paper reports that Google’s new tool “will eventually include content that a user’s connections share through Google’s YouTube video site and Picasa photo service” — which, again, is very similar to how Yahoo’s system automatically updates when a user adds a photo to Flickr or answers a question on Yahoo Answers.

The New York Times describes the Gmail tool as “more vibrant” than what Google already offers through the chat service inside Gmail. With that tool, each new update replaces the one before, leaving no history behind.

Postscript, February 9: We’re liveblogging the official announcement here.

Google has revealed that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were targeted last December in a hacking attempt. That, along with other issues, has convinced the company that it will no longer censor results China as the Chinese government wishes.

In particular, Google has willingly allowed self-censored its search results since January 27, 2006, on its Google China service. The screenshot above show an example of this, where a search for tiananmen on Google China (on the left) doesn’t bring up protest pictures as you get when searching for the same thing on Google’s main site at Google.com.

Google was heavily criticized for caving into China, especially in light of its “Don’t Be Evil” motto. Google CEO Eric Schmidt at one point explained that Google developed an evil scale to weigh if it was better to be a little evil in censoring for the bigger good in bringing information to the Chinese people.

That scale has now tipped so much that Google’s effectively pulling out entirely of censorship. As it has investigated attacks on its Gmail service, Google has decided cooperating on censorship makes no sense. I’ve bolded the key part from today’s blog post:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

What was the attack that triggered all this? Google says that in mid-December, it detected an attack from China on its “corporate infrastructure” that resulted in the theft of “intellectual property” from Google. Exactly what intellectual property was stolen wasn’t disclosed, but it seemed to involve trying to access the Gmail accounts of some Chinese human rights activists. Google says no actual emails were recovered, however:

We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Google also said that it was not the only company to have been attacked in this way:

As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Also as part of its investigation, Google says it has also determined that Gmail accounts of some activists HAVE been accessed but not because of a Google security breach but instead do to activists being victims of malware or phishing attempts:

As part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of US-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers

Google does not explicitly say that the Chinese government itself was behind or condoning the attacks, nor could I get them to confirm this in talking about the move. But that’s the implication. It makes little sense to tell the Chinese government that you’ll no longer cooperate with it on censorship because of hacking attempts unless you believe those had government approval.

Google & Censorship

To understand more about how Google has censored in China, I highly recommend reading Google’s Gatekeepers, a New York Times Magazine article from 2008 that looked in depth at the issue. On the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, Google also blocked all searches for those words, not just particular content that the Chinese government might have deemed illegal. Google also applies censorship to the sources it carries in the Chinese version of Google News.

The censorship is not perfect. For example in a search for tiananmen square, I got images of injured people on Google China (the first and fourth images below, reading from left to right):

Of course, if I were actually within China, the images that I see above might have been better filtered. It’s also confusing to know what anyone sees exactly, since Google shifted to personalizing results for each individual back in December.

China is also not the only country where Google censors. Google also censors in many other countries, including Germany and the US, depending on national laws.

For example, in a search for american nazi party on Google Germany, you can see that Google has censored one result as indicated by the disclaimer it shows at the bottom of the page:

Similarly in a search for Addicted To Bass Winter 2009 download on Google in the US, six pages have been removed because of a copyright infringement claim:

In China, disclaimers are also posted when content is removed, as you see here:

So one issue Google now faces is why it will now fight Chinese censorship but not censorship in other countries. The answer is likely that Google will seek to curb the widespread censorship that China demands especially on political discourse. That broad censorship, even though legal in China, may not be deemed as too restrictive and unreasonable for Google to operate under.

Google & The Chinese Market

Google has diligently worked to build marketshare in China over the years, one of the few countries where Google is not the dominant search player. When Google initially failed to censor, it found itself losing traffic due to government blocking. The current leader, Baidu, gained from this. The ability for people to find music, not always legally, on Baidu also has contributed to its growth.

In another example of its efforts in China, Google underwent a huge fight with Microsoft to retain Kai-Fu Lee as president of its China operations. Lee was formerly a Microsoft employee. In 2008, Lee said his goal was to make Google the Chinese market leader in five years. Google won the fight for Lee, though he eventually left the company late last year.

Postscript: I sent across some further questions to Google, and here’s what I’ve received from the company:

Can you say more by what you mean about intellectual property? Are you talking about some of the code that runs Gmail or what?

This is the subject of an ongoing investigation, and we simply cannot comment on the details.

It sounds like you’re saying the Chinese government was behind this. Is that the case?

We’re not going to speculate, because we don’t know. What’s clear is that the environment in which we are operating in terms of an open Internet is not improving in China. That, combined with these attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, mean that we’re no longer comfortable self-censoring our search in China.

Is the censorship ended as of 3pm Pacific, or is there a phase out?

Via the blog post [we've said]: We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.

That suggests that censorship is continuing for the time being and may do so over the coming weeks.

Postscript 2: There’s building related coverage of the news here on Techmeme. now. I’d also recommend watching long-time China watcher Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog for her take, which I expect will appear in the near future.

Postscript 3: I’ve been talking with people on Twitter, along with some journalists who’ve called me, about the whole “Is Google doing this because it’s losing in China” thing.

No, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, of course. When Google first started censoring, the company’s stance was that primarily, they thought being in China overall was a good thing for the Chinese people and secondarily, it was a good business move for Google. I think people at Google convinced themselves to believe that, even though the primarily move in my mind is that they did censoring for business reasons.

Here we are three years later. Google’s losing, so it wants to get out, and this is a good excuse? Google’s still got a pretty solid share, depending on what numbers you want to look at. From Fortune, from the third quarter of last year, Baidu was by far the leader, with 77%. But Google had about 17% of the market — well behind, but almost double what Bing has in the US market. It’s a healthy percentage.

Moreover, as I often warn when it comes to marketshare percentages, you also have to look at search volume. It’s possible for a company to have its search percentage decline but the number of actual searches it handles go up. That’s because the overall search “pie” itself gets larger. A smaller slice of a bigger pie can be bigger than a big slice of a small pie. And if you look at this PC World article for about the second quarter of last year, Google’s search volume was up.

Marketshare numbers in the US are also incredibly slippery creatures. Some ratings services don’t count things like “local” results. Some of them count a search refinement as a “new” search even though effectively, the same search session is happening. These same complication likely apply to estimates of the Chinese market. And what’s the revenue per search? In September, Forbes had a chart showing that Google’s revenue in China has risen in the past few months while Baidu’s had dropped.

Don’t get me wrong. Baidu is the Google of China, in terms of being dominant. Baidu seems as much a habit to Chinese searchers as Google is for searchers in other countries — and it’s tough for any challenger to break a search habit.

But are things really so dire for Google that it suddenly and abruptly threw in the towel today? Over at TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy talks about speaking with former Google China head Kai Fu Lee and his sense that Google couldn’t win as supporting evidence that today’s move was all about business:

When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.

It’s important to look at the two sentences separately, which is why I’ve italicized the second one.

Let’s take the first. I’ve never spoken to Kai-Fu Lee, nor do I know him well. I do know Google fought hard to bring him in to China and after doing so, it didn’t grow. Was that because Lee himself wasn’t able to do it? Because Google itself simply can’t do it, because of the Baidu habit? Because of a variety of reasons out there? I don’t know. I do know that all this statement tells me is that Lee himself didn’t believe he could get Google into a winning position and decided he didn’t want to be leading a number two entry — not that Google was necessarily doomed to be a weak number two.

That leads to the second sentence. It’s easy to read that as if Lee himself is saying Google decided that doing business in China wasn’t worth it. It’s not. That’s Sarah Lacy making that statement — her opinion. Perhaps correct, perhaps not (just as my own opinion on this might be right or might be wrong). But it’s very important that it not be read as Lee himself saying he left because he thought Google had given up.

As I said on Twitter, Sarah seems far more a China watcher than I am. I’ve never even been to the country. So maybe she’s got a good read of the situation about Google’s prospects. Nor do I disagree that Google had a huge challenge ahead of it and potentially might not ever beat Baidu.

But seriously, this is how it gives up? I think you have to be really, really cynical to choose this as among all the reasons for it pulling out in the way it did. You have to assume Google decided this would somehow cloak its China failure (and if that was the case, it’s only highlighting it to some). Potentially, Google might have thought this was a good way to put pressure on the other challengers in China — Bing and Yahoo — to pull out. After all, they’ve been under political pressure here in the US to stop doing it. That pressure will probably grow.

While I’m not a China watcher, I am a long-time Google watcher. As I look at how the company has reacted, though the prism of my knowledge of what Google does and why it does things, this is personal.

Look, it was incredibly disappointing when Google agreed to censor in China. I felt if Google couldn’t stand up to those demands, with its “Don’t Be Evil” motto, who would? And before I roll out the big bravo in the way that the EFF did today, I’m waiting to see that the censorship has really stopped with solid confirmation of it. Even then, glad that I’ll be for it to stop, it’ll still be tinged with disappointment that Google did it in the first place.

But what really made Google “get” that censoring in China was wrong, when so many said this three years ago? I think it’s because this time, Google’s “kids” were attacked.

Google is an engineering culture. The engineer rules over everything. And for these engineers, their creations are like children.

The Chinese hacking attacks that Google alleges are like an attack on those children. It’s a line that I think Google simply would not allow to be crossed. I think Google is reacting in the harsh way it did today because it feels like a mother who just watched some bully pick on their child. She’s going to pull the child close and say to the attacker, “Only over my dead body. Do what you want to me. You leave my child alone.”

And that’s what Google did today. Sure, Google says it hopes that it can find a solution with the Chinese government. But ultimately, it has had enough and simply doesn’t give a damn. It’s also a big enough company with plenty of revenue from other sources to be able to walk away — not to mention that it is ultimately controlled by two founders with a stock structure that means they can ignore whatever the markets might think, if they really want.

Postscript 4: The Wall Street Journal has a piece saying the decision was “hotly” debated among Google execs. CEO Eric Schmidt was worried about a possible backlash (from whom, the Chinese government? Google investors? That’s not said). Google cofounder Sergey Brin is suggested as a driving force for pulling out.

Brin was vocal shortly after the decision was made in 2006 that he felt Google had compromised its principles and made many wonder if the company would change its mind back then. Last January, Brin again expressed misgivings, calling the decision to censor a business “net negative.”

Meanwhile, via Rebecca MacKinnon, a picture of Chinese leaving flowers at Google’s headquarters in Beijing, I assume in support of the company’s move.

Postscript 5: Microsoft sends me this:

We have no indication that any of our mail properties has been compromised.

I also asked if Microsoft would cease censoring results on Bing China (the company has an incredibly tiny share of the market using this). I didn’t get a response on that. Microsoft recently came under fire when it was found that the regular version of Bing hosted outside China and aimed at anyone in general appeared to have Chinese censoring going on. The company responded that this was a bug.

This is a good point to note that Google does not censor on its main site, Google.com. Chinese have been able to get uncensored results from that site even after Google agreed to censor on its Chinese site. The challenge has been that they would find that clicking on links at Google.com often would not work because of Chinese blocking. Sometimes, people can get redirected to Baidu.

Yahoo sent me this:

Yahoo! is committed to protecting human rights and takes our users’ privacy and security very seriously. We condemn any attempts to infiltrate company networks to obtain user information.  We stand aligned with Google that these kinds of attacks are deeply disturbing and strongly believe that the violation of user privacy is something that we as internet pioneers must all oppose.  Yahoo! sold its China business in 2005, and while maintaining a financial investment, we no longer have operational control over the Yahoo! China business. Yahoo! is committed to protecting our users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy.  You can learn more about our human rights efforts here: http://humanrights.yahoo.com.

You had also asked if Yahoo! was attacked.

Yahoo does not disclose that type of information, but we take security very seriously and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach. If you need to, please also feel free to attribute that to a Yahoo! spokesperson.

Postscript 6: Microsoft has sent me this further statement:

We are aware of the situation involving attacks against the corporate networks of Google and a number of other companies.  At this point, we don’t have any indication that our corporate network or any of our mail properties were attacked.  We work closely with the authorities and other technology companies like Google on Internet safety issues, and we will continue to actively monitor this situation.  As Google and the State Department have indicated, this situation is the subject of an ongoing international investigation, so it is not appropriate to say anything further

See also our recap of reactions, Google’s China Gambit: Day Two Reaction.

My earlier blog post provided some initial “hands on” reactions to the service. It’s a powerful and flexible tool that defies easy categorization. As I said earlier this month:

[Wave] looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

Accordingly Wave has huge potential, but people will definitely need to use and experiment with it before they understand and see its benefits. There’s a clear learning curve and some complexity surrounding the product; it’s not entirely intuitive. Wave probably also needs to incorporate email in order to go mainstream.

Google still considers Wave to be in “preview” as it works out kinks and bugs of one sort or another. As it releases Wave more broadly Google will gain considerable feedback, which should help it add features and refinements. Here’s the video demo of Google Wave in action from the I/O Developer event in May.

Google has more in its blog post this morning.

Postscript: There’s an already emerging developer ecosystem around Wave. These “extensions” (widgets, plug-ins) will make Wave’s value and use cases more obvious to new users and will speed adoption. For example, see the Ribbit extension for conference calls or 6 Rounds for video chat.

By way of background, Danny and I wrote about Wave when it was first announced earlier this year and then offered some third-party developer observations.

Without doing a full “review,” I’ll offer some initial thoughts from my 50 or so minutes with the Wave team and hands-on experience with Wave:

It’s an exciting — possibly breakthrough — product that eludes simple categorization. Wave does lots of things and has the potential to do many more. However, there’s almost a “cultural” adaptation necessitated by it. People have to get used to communicating in a kind of “layered” way that Wave both allows and almost requires.

The screenshot above, from our Wave demo, looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

It may be premature to discuss this, but a key to the mainstream appeal and adoption of Wave will be its ability to incorporate existing email accounts and to function as a client for traditional email.

During the demo most of the emphasis had been on enterprise or B2B collaboration. It struck me that teens would recognize this as a social tool and potential successor to IM — and would take to it accordingly. I made a comment along those lines and Google’s Rasmussen conveyed an anecdote about a test with Sydney (Australia) 3rd graders who used Wave and apparently had a great deal of fun with it.

That’s saying something if both developers and 3rd graders can equally use it. However, as Wave rolls out and more people are exposed, more of its potential and an expanding list of scenarios and use cases will likely emerge.

Danny live blogged the keynote earlier this morning. He jokingly compared Wave to Lotus Notes. In some respects that’s not an entirely inappropriate comparison, given the scope of the product and the emphasis on collaboration — though the Google folks would probably disagree.

Wave seems to be conceived as a total communication and collaboration tool and therefore a successor and replacement for IM and email. In some respects then this is as ambitious as Android, perhaps even more so. It also encompasses mobile communication between users and mobile to PC communications in theory. The keynote presenters demo’d Wave on the iPhone and Android running in the browser.

One of the reporters in the in the room asked the panel about how they thought they were going to get people to change their behavior and abandon email for this new tool. Google responded that what they showed was an early “developer preview” and that there was still lots of work to do and a longish time horizon for the product. What wasn’t discussed was the way that social networks (and Twitter to a lesser degree) are taking the place of email in many instances. So it may not be such a huge problem to shift behavior in the end, provided the user experience is compelling to people.

Wave does seem to me to be a bit bulky and complex, from the blur of screens and demos I saw this morning sitting on the floor in a hall with more than 1,000 people. But the real-time aspect of it — the fact that you can actually see the other person typing — is pretty compelling.

This is a project that unfolded in Australia with 100 Google engineers and began in 2007. It was based on a general concept pitch to Brin by the developers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who had previously built Google Maps. Based on that track record Brin said he approved the project and associated resources (not unlike a movie studio approves a pitch by a trusted director or producer). It sounds like Google has spent a bunch of money on this (no figures were discussed) and is pretty invested in its success.

There is no apparent business model (though one could imagine enterprise licensing) and Google intends to open-source it, which is probably smart from an adoption standpoint. Yet stepping back Wave is consistent with Google’s larger effort to move software and applications development into the browser and the cloud.

The Google Apps status page does confirm issues for some users. The question is, how many and for how long? It does seem fairly wide spread.

There are more people covering this at Techmeme.

Postscript: Here is the official post from Google on the issue that effected 14% of their users.

The company announced a new tool that simplifies the process of importing emails and contacts from other providers, including bigger competitors like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

All new Gmail users have access to the import feature via the renamed “Accounts and Import” tab in Gmail Settings. The import feature will be “slowly rolled out” to existing Gmail users.

The import tool currently supports close to 50 email providers. You can see the full list in Gmail Help.