Facebook and PayPal announced a strategic alliance which will see PayPal being offered as a payment option for Facebook advertisers and users. Approximately 70% of Facebook users live outside the United States and having a global online payment partner would make it easier for these people to part with their money.

I remember seeing PayPal included as one of the payment options in a game that I play on Facebook not too long ago. It wasn’t available previously but I guess it was just on a small testing scale prior to this announcement.

I have to admit, though, that with the ease of making payments, there had been quite a few times that I almost bought virtual money with my real money. Luckily I came to my senses in time. Phew!!

Following a deluge of complaints from Gmail overs over privacy concerns in Google Buzz, a new Google feature that integrates in Gmail that was launched four days ago, engineers have worked around the clock to redesign Google Buzz following an apology for the compromise it created on our privacy. Some of the changes that we are seeing now is that Google Buzz now no longer automatically connects our public Picasa photo albums and Google Reader list to our Buzz profile.

I haven’t really tried out Buzz myself because I read that as long as we do not post a status message, we will not have a public profile activated, unless we manually create one. I did not and because of all these privacy concerns, but I have noticed from the status messages that my friends posted, that even tweets pre-Buzz appeared in his Buzz.

However, Buzz is not able to repost our Facebook status messages or is it able to let users publish Twitter or Facebook statuses through Buzz.

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Looks like I am not alone when I said that privacy would be compromised by integrating something like Google Buzz to our Gmail accounts. While my concern is at the account level, most web users are concerned that they contact list will be exposed to other people within the same list.

HHmm how come I see people without a problem when it comes to exposing their friendship and other relationships with people who are in the same contact list on Facebook? Isn’t that double standard?

Anyway, in a blog post, Gmail has promised to address this privacy concern in its next update to Buzz and they are even considering making Buzz a standalone website, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Perhaps that would spur more people to use it seeing that it’s a Google brand.

Anyway, from launch until today, most of my friends are still clueless about Buzz and why they should use it. Only a couple of my friends are testing it out, and that also because they are going to blog about their experience with Google Buzz!