Google’s Google Buzz, one of the more controversial product launches by the internet giant, is a service that integrates features of social networking and location sharing applications in to Google’s mail service, GMail.

Users of Gmail across the nation and in Dallas, immediately had the privacy of their email contacts compromised with the integration of Buzz into their email accounts, leading to a lawsuit filed with the FTC in direct response to privacy concerns.

Today, a product manager from Google told attendees at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas that Google had misstepped by launching its social network, Google Buzz, too broadly and too promiscuously. In the future, said Google’s Todd Jackson, the company will pre-test new features rather than roll them out to all customers at once.

Earlier in the day, keynote speaker Danah Boyd, a social media researcher with Microsoft, complained that Gmail had been “one of the most private systems imaginable” until Google Buzz came on the scene. “There’s a big difference between publicly available data and publicized data,” she said. “I worry about this publication process, and who will be caught in the crossfire” when information that Gmail users had instinctively treated as private was suddenly made public.

One of the larger concerns for those that use GMail for business purposes, is Google Buzz’s forced integration of one’s personal, social network, lives, with their work lives, which most like to keep separate. Google Buzz initially attempted to publish personal networks for us based on the people we interact with for work.

Google attempted to correct this issue by Google discontinuing the much discussed feature of which automatically connected you through Buzz to the people you email and chat with most. In its’ place, Google has adopted an auto-suggest model, in which you are shown the friend list with an option to de-select people before publishing the list. Moreover, Google would cease automatically connecting Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader to Buzz, allow users to hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely.

The corrections were nice, but the damage had been done. Do you use Buzz? Where the initial problems enough to turn you off for good? Leave your feedback below, submit any questions to us via Formspring, visit our Facebook page, or follow us on Twitter.