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  GMAIL USERS: You’re welcome to join the discussion over on Mashable’s Google Buzz account . Google Buzz is not a rival to Facebook or Twitter, says Google exec Bradley Horowitz — instead he sees it as a platform for conversation, and hopes other services will be able to flow in and out of Buzz. In an eWeek interview earlier this week, Horowitz, Google’s VP of product management, was asked whether Buzz was intended as a challenger to Twitter and Facebook. He replied:

Perhaps you, like me, have a friend who is always fond of the obvious. Perhaps that friend doesn't work at Google. Having launched its new Buzz service last week, melding some mimicry of Twitter and Facebook, Google seemed to take a page straight from the latter's Beacon of customer service by creating start-up settings that were anything other than comfortable, anything other than private. This seemed obvious to many. Now, having been buzzed by feedback from annoyed users and commentators, Google announced on its blog Saturday that it will make radical changes to the Buzz start-up experience over the next few days. In a post by Gmail and Google Buzz Product Manager Todd Jackson, Google says that it has been listening "loud and clear."

Google moved quickly over the weekend to try to contain mounting criticism of Buzz, its social network, apologizing to users for features that were widely seen as endangering privacy and announcing product changes to address those concerns. Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Google had decided to alter one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts in Gmail. Instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz will in the future merely suggest to new users a group of people they may want to follow or be followed by, he said. Mr. Jackson, who said that the auto-follow feature had been intended to make it easy for people to get started on Buzz, acknowledged the criticism that was heaped on Google in the last few days. “We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to impro...

Will Google's version give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money? As rumored yesterday, Google launched a new social effort today called Google Buzz. If you're immediate reaction is, "Wait, doesn't Yahoo! already have a product named Buzz?" Then you'd be correct. But Google didn't acquire Yahoo! Buzz. Nor has Yahoo! Buzz gone defunct and Google felt ok about picking it up as a name. The two products are alike in name and the fact that they're social. But that's about it. Google Buzz lets you be social from Gmail. You can update your status there and share photos. (Yahoo! Buzz is more akin to social bookmarking and trending topics.)

Buzz has some great rich-media sharing capabilities. But Facebook still owns your social-sharing network.