I think the parent comment was referring to sharing items in Google Reader, which was public or only to friends (which were generated from the people I had listed Google Talk, initially for me)
The parent comment missed the fact that before you were sharing links, here you are sharing the list of people you email frequently or chat with, which is an entirely different proposition and was handled poorly in a misguided attempt to imitate your twitter "following" list.
Except for that oversight on the list of people you are following, the Google sharing model for items you share is much more advanced than Twitter or Facebook, and makes it easy to share things with a particular group of people.
The problem is that Buzz automatically adds email contacts as followers, and then publically displays who all of your other followers/ees are. So, if you were sharing items in Reader with a small group, once Buzz went live, you were also sharing them with everyone who was automatically added, and they could see who else you were sharing them with. Completely unacceptable.
I think most people were already doing public sharing in Reader- it was the default there. (Not of the people, but of the items). I am not sure what exactly was happening with private sharing in Reader, but it was an option and was limited to fairly small group. I made my google reader share's public and posted them on my blog. My comments showed up in that feed.
You also would see the names of people that would comment on the items of people you were following in Reader, even if you weren't following them. So, I definitely see your point about names, but there were cases in Reader where this was already happening.
In any case, I turned on Buzz almost right away. I got to the first step and decided I needed to turn around and clean up my contacts list, I then turned it on. That could have easily been designed into the activation process.
The parent comment missed the fact that before you were sharing links, here you are sharing the list of people you email frequently or chat with, which is an entirely different proposition and was handled poorly in a misguided attempt to imitate your twitter "following" list.
Except for that oversight on the list of people you are following, the Google sharing model for items you share is much more advanced than Twitter or Facebook, and makes it easy to share things with a particular group of people.