Now perhaps, eventually, we’d get to know each other a little better and want to correspond with each other using emails. This is where I’ve stumbled upon a troublesome little catch.

When you follow a stranger’s Buzz stream, you don’t get to see his email address unless he opens it up to public view (improbable and not advisable). There doesn’t seem to be any Direct Message (ala Twitter) capabilities, so there’s no way for us to privately message each other to exchange non-public information such as email addresses. It’s rather dumb as well to ask for this information in a public Buzz message as everybody else can see it.

I can understand that Google folks may think that a DM feature may be redundant, as it duplicates what emails are supposed to achieve. But yet, this particular use case remains unfulfilled.

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