Google Buzz has gotten off to a very rocky start, and the company is moving quickly to address privacy concerns resulting from its auto-follow feature.

The Buzz fiasco is encouraging, however, as another example of how the privacy police can alter the development and implementation of products. As we’ve seen, the Internet can be self-correcting, as users and self-anointed watchdogs work together to police new technologies and policies that can threaten our privacy. Google is the most powerful Internet company in the world, yet they understand that they have no choice but to take these concerns seriously.

This phenomenon will also strengthen our democracy and democracies (and fledgling democracies) around the world. Governments will think twice before imposing intrusive policies on their citizens.

Wired is one of my favorite magazines, and the recent story by Evan Ratliff is one of my all-time favorites. Ratliff tried an interesting experiment, as he tried to disappear without a trace and then challenge the world to find him.

The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?

It’s one thing to report on the phenomenon of people disappearing. But to really understand it, I figured that I had to try it myself. So I decided to vanish. I would leave behind my loved ones, my home, and my name. I wasn’t going off the grid, dropping out to live in a cabin. Rather, I would actually try to drop my life and pick up another.

Wired offered a $5,000 bounty — $3,000 of which would come out of my own pocket — to anyone who could locate me between August 15 and September 15, say the password “fluke,” and take my picture.

The story is a compelling read, so I won’t reveal what happened. Read the story first, and then go back and read some of the follow-up blog posts.

The struggle for privacy will be one of the enduring issues facing us in this century, and we’re just getting started. The Ratliff story poses some interesting questions for all of us to ponder.

A federal judge has ruled that Craigslist is not liable for ads listed on its site.

A federal judge in Illinois has dismissed a lawsuit by Cook County sheriff Thomas Dart accusing Craigslist of creating a public nuisance by allegedly running prostitution ads.

U.S. District Court Judge John Grady in Illinois ruled Tuesday that the federal Communications Decency Act protects Craigslist from liability for unlawful ads submitted by users.

“Sheriff Dart may continue to use Craigslist’s website to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content,” Grady wrote. “But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct.”

Good. The attacks on Craigslist have been ridiculous and unfair. Imagine the consequences of holding sites liable for everything posted on their sites. Social networking and new media are revolutionizing the way we communicate and will have significant implications for business as well. We don’t need the morals police holding companies liable for individual behavior they deem to be problematic.

Twitter’s new feature is currently in Beta, so you’ll only have it if you’ve been invited, but the new Twitter Lists feature is creating quite a buzz.

ReadWriteWeb.com has a handy post explaining how all this works. The process is rather cumbersome, as you have to add people one at a time to the lists you create. You also have the option to make your lists public, so that can create some very interesting lists for others to follow. Getting on certain public lists will probably be the next status symbol next to the number of followers.

Also, each list can be followed as well, which will probably touch of a new frenzy as lists are created and followed.

It will be fun to see how all this develops. In was inevitable that Twitter would start adding more features, but the simplicity of the service has been one of its best qualities. Simple often works better, though that often changes when you have explosive growth. It’s a great problem to have, so get ready for lists mania!

Pepsi ought to leave the dating scene to the pick-up artists. Their attempt to create a humorous app has resulted in an epic fail.

When it comes to dating, the difference between success and failure often comes down to delivery. And as Pepsi Co. learned this week, even a good bit of self-deprecation can’t fix a poorly executed pick up line.

Pepsi’s AMP energy drink released a new app — “Amp Up Before You Score” — which got into trouble with more than a few people for the way it approached the fairer sex.

Pepsi quickly took to social media to apologize, but by broadcasting the apology across platforms and brands (and including a self-deprecating hashtag), Pepsi helped turn the tkt into a tempest.

“Before You Score” categorizes women into 24 types — including “Cougar,” “bookworm,” “treehugger” and “rebound girl” — and then gives users conversational resources, namely wikipedia articles and other superficial info to help with pickup lines. In an additional layer of sensitivity, the app connects to social media so that users can share their conquests: “Get lucky? Add her to your Brag List. You can include a name, date and whatever details you remember.”

In one sense I give them credit for trying. Brands need to find new ways to reach their audience, but this effort is just hilarious.

Forbes has an interesting article about the web 2.0 situation in China.

Forbes: Facebook and Twitter have been blocked here in China since the unrest this year in Xinjiang, and some Chinese Twitter clones are blocked as well. Why is this the case, and do you see the controls loosening up in the near future?

Anti: Web 2.0 Web sites like Facebook and Twitter can offer the public firsthand information, even faster than a government news agency like Xinhua. In fact, the July 5 Urumqi riots news was spreading first on Twitter hours before the first Xinhua English news piece. The Chinese government believes that the situation in Urumqi and other cities would be out of control if they can’t control the information flow. That’s the basic logic behind their decision to block Twitter and other Web 2.0 Web sites.

But this wide-scale blocking costs a lot. Discontentment in cyberspace could lead more common Chinese netizens to try to protest if all of their favorite social networking, photo sharing, video and microblogging services are blocked in the long term. And this crazy-wild blocking also harms the investment environment, which now almost makes China a Web 2.0 hell for investors. So China may loosen up the blocking in some sense.

The political reasons behind this policy are fairly clear given the recent events in Iran. Yet the risks are huge for China’s social media and tech industries as mentioned above. Can China really expect to compete in a world where Americans and others use social media to revolutionize business, news and education? The Chinese run the risk of falling way behind.

Google Wave sounds VERY cool.

Google is about to hit a milestone for a product that the search giant hopes will transform how people communicate and collaborate online, and perhaps hook more users on Google’s menu of web based services.

Google Wave, which combines elements of email, instant messaging and social networking to allow groups of people to collaborate on a task in real time, will be previewed starting to more than 100,000 developers and users who have signed up to try Wave and give Google feedback on how well it works.

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Wave users running Ribbit’s applications could, for example, hold a telephone conference that would connect through any kind of voice communication – a mobile phone, a land line or voice-over-internet – and then store a recording of the resulting conversation as an audio file or transcribe the conversation into a text document embedded in the Wave.

Another application Google demonstrated on its blog included a group of friends in scattered locations using the online version of the Lonely Planet guides to plan a trip to Australia through Wave, searching out attractions in Melbourne with Google maps, reading Lonely’s Planet’s description of those places, messaging their thoughts with the rest of the group, and collectively writing up a day-by-day itinerary, within one wave.

The idea here is real-time collaboration on the web. For many of us who have “virtual companies” with workers working remotely in different locations, Google Wave could revolutionize how we work.

There are some issues with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (big surprise) but it’s supposed to work well with other major browsers.

A demonstration is available here.

Google has sent out a bunch of invites for people to use the beta version of the product, and naturally people are all over this on Twitter, as some are trying to sell their invitations – #googlewave.

This is an encouraging story.

On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.

The push to promote cloud computing is part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for federal I.T. in the process.

The apps storefront, which is run by the General Services Administration, includes an array of business applications, productivity software, services like storage and Web hosting and social applications. In a speech at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Mr. Kundra said that the cloud offerings could be cheaper and more energy-efficient and allow the federal government to benefit from the same technological advances that most consumers enjoy.

Wow. Is it possible that we finally have an administration that embraces technology and the Internet? Can you imagine how much money our government wastes on inefficient systems and hardware?

Assuming they can manage the security issues, this could be a huge benefit for the government, making it more efficient, more effective, and cheaper as well.

This one sounds interesting.

The “limited beta” has become a right of passage for budding Web companies. In the case of Seattle-based Gist.com, an e-mail in-box management service, it’s a business strategy.

Gist launched on Tuesday, concluding an almost two-year period of controlled growth. During that time, thousands of potential users signed up for an invitation and dutifully filled out a survey for potential users. In exchange for the mere chance to be invited to test the service, chief executive T.A. McCann got from users behavioral data, feature ideas and marketing leads–all for free.

The relationship management service scours some 60,000 news sources, 20 million blogs and 600,000 Twitter handles and matches up the information they find to a contact list generated from a user’s e-mail correspondence. The result is that Gist is an advanced Web communication tool that helps you keep tabs on the people and companies that matter most. Some of the company’s success, however, comes from one the Web’s most primitive of communication tools: online forms.

We’ll see how this does, but there’s a clear need for this service, as we all struggle to manage all sorts of online accounts. Anything that can centralize one’s networking strategy is worth trying.

Facebook has announced that it is now cash-flow positive, and than it recently reached the 300 million member threshold. That’s a pretty stunning number.

Again, the free service model is a winner on the web.