That's a practical solution but the need to do this supports this article's basic point. It was in Google's best interest to opt-in all your contacts. For the user it would have undoubtably been a better experience if they could start with a clean slate or at least had a list of contacts to check/uncheck when Buzz was enabled for the first time. Google must have realized the potential risk of doing this but figured the land grab was worth it. I don't like that much.

I think the fact that they are, in a sense, late to the party on this stuff means they don't want to just take a passive approach to building a community of Buzz users.

I mean, I for one didn't mind it doing contact stuff for me. Saved me some time trying to add a bunch of people.

I'm not convinced a clean slate would be more desirable. I appreciated the feature; particularly as I've been rather surprised by who among my contacts has taken to the service thus far. The unfollows have been far fewer in number than the manual follows would have been.

I'm also not sure what interest Google would have that would be counter to the user's best interest. What is Google's motivation other than getting as many people as possible to use the service as much as possible? If the auto-populated follow list posed a conversion problem, wouldn't that also be counter to Google's best interest?

What's the ulterior motive that is served by auto-follow?