Two days ago, we removed the Google Buzz button from the top and bottom of each post on TechCrunch. No one noticed. Not a single person said a word about it. It wasn’t until earlier today when I tweeted

As we first reported late last week, Lars Rasmussen, the father of both Google Maps and Google Wave, has left Google is heading to Facebook. As we suspected, part of the reason is that Google pulled the plug on Wave barely a year into its existence. “It takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend. And that brings up another question. Google’s other big social

After your initial surge of people connecting to your social graph what do you do to strengthen it? Launch a “who to follow” feature. It worked for Facebook. It’s working for Twitter. And now Google Buzz is going to give it a try.

As they announced tonight in their Buzz feed, the next time users load up the Buzz tab in Gmail, they should be greeted with a box suggesting other people to follow. Google says these will be based on people you frequently email and/or chat with. It also depends on your social connections on other networks (aka your social circle), and activity on Buzz. Only people with public profiles will appear as suggestions, Google says.

If you find a person you like, you can click a button to follow them. Or if you don’t like a suggestion, you can click an “ignore” button and they won’t show up again. Pretty standard stuff at this point, but it works. What was so great about Twitter’s implementation of this a few weeks ago was that it was front and center on Twitter.com. I started noticing a huge uptick in people following me, and I found a lot of people to follow that way as well. Of course, they still need a way to collapse that box so it doesn’t always have to be in your face. It looks as if Buzz’s box will have a close (and “Done”) button.

Buzz’s implementation may be slightly more controversial because once again they’re looking at your email/chat habits to suggest people to you. Sometimes these aren’t people you necessarily want as friends on social networks. But the ignore button should work fine there.

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Google Social Search is a good idea. You take regular Google search results and intertwine them with related elements that your contacts have shared on various social networks. But there’s one big barrier to entry. In order for your contacts to automatically share elements, they have to link up their various social profiles to their Google Profile page. A lot of people are simply not going to do that. So Google is changing things up a bit and making it easier to get at social data.

Starting today and rolling out over the cource of this week, Google will begin looking at items you share on Buzz and crawling elements from those social networks to use in Social Search as well. For example, if you link up your Twitter feed to your Buzz page, even if you haven’t linked it to your Google Profile, you’ll now start seeing results from your Twitter social graph in the results.

Obviously, Google is just going to be crawling public information. And if you want them to stop crawling something, you can simply unlink it from your Buzz account (just as you can unlink it from your Google Profile). Though this unlinking may take a little bit of time due to the crawlers, I’m told.

“It’s a win for users because it creates more value in Social Search,” Google’s Matt Cutts tells us. I asked Cutts where most of the Social Search data comes in from, and while he didn’t have any hard data, he said that Twitter was obviously one of the biggies (though there is still the Twitter/Buzz disconnect). FriendFeed also remains a valuable source of data, he says.

But now that anything you share in Buzz can be pulled into these Social Search results, hopefully there will be even more diverse data — and more of it overall. While it’s not happening just yet, Cutts envisioned a time when searching in a particular area (known from geolocation in your browser) would pull in results from your Foursquare social graph, for example.

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Google is weird. I mean seriously weird. Or maybe it’s just Google Buzz.

With all the Facebook privacy issues going on right now I thought I’d go and check out Google Buzz. I’d heard a rumour you couldn’t delete your profile. On the face of it, it would appear you can. At the bottom of the Edit Profile page, there is a link to deleting your Buzz profile which says “This will disable Google Buzz integration in Gmail and delete your Google profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone you are following.”

Fine, that’s good enough for me. It may well be that Google retains data whether I know it or not. I pretty much assume Google keeps everything. That’s not what caught my eye.

What got my attention were the other profiles Google was “suggesting” I add to mine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch