I have turned off Google Buzz, if you have not find a reason good enough for this, let’s firs read this article on BusinessInsider and then read the rest of this post.

The article mentioned above is a bit technical, let me explain the threat in simplest words and then I will show you how to remove it.

The privacy threat behind Google Buzz:

Consider the snapshot beow:

I you have enabled Google Buzz and when you will click on anyone of your contacts you will see this a screen like above, pretty innocent, hmmm, No!

If you click on the link on the “following” link, you will instantly get all my contacts!

Imagine all my contacts, family members, business contacts,friends and foes etc. Everything exposed! and the best part is that all of this has been done without any explicit statement from Google!

If you have any doubts check this out in your buzz Now!

How to Turn Off Google Buzz Effectively and Safely!

Before you turn of Google Buzz completely, first step is to unfollow everyone, do it mannually and now! This is how you will do it:

1. Click on the Buzz Icon
2. Click on your name

• Click on your Following Link and UnFollow everyone!

Turn Off Google Buzz Until Google Updates its policies:

Scroll Down to bottom of Gmail Window and Click Turn Off Buzz.

This is the worst ever mistake made by Google (made by Google in my Opinion). I will discuss in my future posts about the possible threats about such mistakes from Google or similar companies.

[Update: Thursday, February 11, 2010 4:49 PM] Google has updated there policy about Google Buzz as a response to complains, I am not sure about the consequences yet, check it:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html

Quite recently, I saw a video(embedded below) from Google on Social Search. Although it seems pretty impressive and good, but I have some questions/thoughts from Marketing/SEO point of view:

• Since users will now be able to see suggestions/blogposts/tweets etc from our contacts, so this opens are whole new platform for Social Media Marketing i.e. if you have established yourself as a friendly guy in any popular social media platform like Facebook, and you are an open Networker i.e. who adds other people as friends without any previous acquittance, then you have a very huge opportunity that you can influence and market a huge number of audience in many diverse niches, all you need is quality content on various topics with a touch of SEO and Google will do the rest of work for you,
• The downside is that now we will see even more social media SPAM
• I am eager to know what will be your stance on this change in SERPs?

• Will you establish yourself as an open networker ?

• If Yes, what will the effects on your personal life? Will you manage multiple accounts? What will be the ethics in this case?

• If No, will you miss this opportunity? Will this refrain others from using social media for even more marketing purposes?

• What can be best practices,ethically, to use this opportunity to market products and services on social media, with special reference this recent update?

I will try to answer this in my coming posts, but I need your feedback too.

Here are the quick and easy steps to implement, if you want a report of website traffic, excluding a specific country or territory.

However,it should be noted that, it is among the best practices to create new test profiles when you are testing our filters or other advanced analytics setups. The reason is that it is not unusual that some of your experiments might turn out to be wrong or do not meet your specific requirements, if you have multiple profiles, then you can safely delete the newly created one without loss of critical data. You should have one untouched raw analytics profile, always.

Having said that, lets move towards our setup, I have already created a new profile for the same website and name it “Filtered Traffic”

As soon as you create the new profile, click the edit button and scroll down to see the “Add New Filter” option.

Kindly note that Google Analytics have 2 types of Filter Setups,i.e. Predefined and Custom, we will select the Custom Filter.

Now select the Visitor Country option to mention the excluded region.

Now in the “Filter Pattern” box, enter your desired value or values.e.g. Filter Pattern: brazil|Argentina

Note:The pipe symbol | allows for multiples within the same pattern. Thus, you can mention one or many countries in the same pattern.

Another way is to put country names you want to exclude separated with | sign, and enclose it with ( ) in Filter Pattern field. For example if you want to exclude traffic stats from China, Australia and India the  filter pattern will be(China|Australia|India) . And that’s all, now save this filter by clicking “Save Changes” button.

Kindly note that | and () are regular expressions, they have many uses, read about them at: Google’s Help Page

I am setting up analytics for my new projects and hence my future posts will around this topic. If you like to be informed about future posts, kindly subscribe to RSS of this blog. Also I have taken help and inspiration for this post from WasimAsif’s blog, thanks to him.