disabling google buzz in a corporate or academic network

R wanted some way to block google buzz at work. According to him, too many people were spending too much time on Buzz, with a spike in network bandwidth. And following friends of friends and other such undesirable activities. This was my reply.

This question has been asked in gmail support forums also, but since
buzz is integrated into gmail, it seems difficult to block it using
traditional methods. Here is one way I can think of:

Make the user log in to gmail using an older browser, or a browser not
supported in the latest gmail version. For example, I am typing this
in Opera 8.53 - available from oldversion.com - then, buzz is not even
seen. It is not using html view, either - it is using the older
version of gmail, which you can see from the url
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1&ui=1&ov=0
This version has most of the useful things like address completion and so on.

(If you can redirect users to this url when they go to gmail also, it
might do the trick.)

One way of forcing users to use an old browser would be to allow gmail
only on terminal sessions running on a terminal server or remote X
sessions running on a linux server or remote desktop sessions. Since
the user is just logging on to the server, permissions can be set so
that the user cannot install any sw. Possibly such permissions can be
set on the desktops also.

Edit: R says it's not practical for him to change user settings. He will explore a url rewrite using squid's php rewrite or something like that, to redirect any requests to mail.google.com/mail to mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1