Google's Dennis Woodside says the company rolled out Google Buzz too abruptly and likely won't introduce other new products in a similar manner.
Woodside, Google's vice president of American operations, says Google also shouldn't have linked Buzz to people's Gmail contacts because e-mail contacts aren't necessarily part of people's social networks.
Google employees used Buzz internally before its release and didn't pick up some of these issues, he says.
"That's the cost, to some degree, of innovation," says Woodside, referring to missteps with Buzz.
Woodside was answering questions today after delivering a keynote address at the TravelCom conference in Dallas.
Woodside also addressed Google's motivations for running its first Super Bowl ad, the Parisian Love video.
He says much of the buzz these days surrounding Google has little to do with its core search functionality so Google's goal with the ad was to reach a large TV audience at the Super Bowl and reconnect with consumers' passion for search.
Woodside also lent his support for Google's initiatives in behavioral advertising and believes that the advertising industry is moving in the right direction.
Google's policy is to be transparent about behavioral advertising and give consumers tools to opt out of targeted advertising, if that is what they desire, he says.
In that regard, Google has a Google Ads Preferences manager, which is geared to inform consumers about which interests Google associates with them, and it also gives the consumers the power to add or delete interests.
[I just looked up my Google Ad Preferences and it says: "No interest categories are associated with your ads preferences so far." Woops, I guess I'm fairly uninteresting.]
Woodside says the reason few people click on display ads is that targetting is not as advanced as it is with search ads, and that behavioral advertising will improve results for display-ad publishers.
And, what's in store for e-readers like the Kindle or possibly the iPad?
Arguing that Amazon's Kindle is a closed system, Woodside believes open systems will eventually prevail and that particular devices will become less important.
Woodside believes eventually most e-books will be accessible over the Web through browsers.
Says Woodside: "On the Web, open systems seem to win in the long run."