Despite the fact that I no longer work on ruby or rails at work, the posts on this blog will remain mostly unchanged. Ruby, rails and web technologies will continue to be the main topics here. Hopefully, the fact that I no longer work on rails at work will spur me towards learning other cool ruby libraries and frameworks like shoes, camping and sinatra.

What kind of posts would you like to see in the future in this blog? Since I won’t get ideas for posts at work anymore, I would love some suggestions for posts about ruby/rails how-tos.

My initial impression about Buzz was positive, but having looked at it for the past week, I have had to change my opinion. Here’s a list of reasons why I don”t like Buzz and would much rather prefer to continue using Twitter.

Comments on a Buzz

This is the one feature that really puts me off. Not that I am against users being able to react to their friend’s Buzz, but every time someone posts a comment on a buzz, it appears on my page even if the commenter isn’t someone I follow. Twitter handles this much more elegantly by showing only the replies by people who I am following. How could the Buzz team have missed something so obvious?

Can’t tweet through Buzz

I might have considered Buzz as an option if it automatically posted my buzzes to Twitter. But this hasn’t happened, and only tweets from Twitter are imported into Buzz and even that seems buggy. I saw a tweet posted weeks ago by a friend imported into Buzz.

No Facebook integration

To be honest, I wouldn’t really use this feature, but a lot of other people would and giving us a choice would have been a nice thing to do rather than ignore Facebook completely.

Not everybody deserves a microblogging audience

I’m sorry I sound so arrogant here but that’s my honest opinion. With Buzz, Google has made microblogging easily accessible to people who otherwise wouldn’t bother with microblogging and therefore never joined twitter. Now all those hundreds of people have a microblogging service within their mailbox and we’re flooded with absolutely boring, pointless and quite often incomprehensible statuses. There are plenty of people like that in Twitter, but at least Twitter — unlike Buzz — didn’t assume that I would want to follow them.

Assumptions

As someone who develops web applications, I know that assumptions are a good thing. Sometimes you have to make choices for your users so their work is reduced. But you must also know where to draw the line. As a user I don’t at all appreciate that Google decided who I should follow and who should follow me and what I should share with my followers. I believe Google has changed this since then, but it did damage the first impression.

Too many features

One thing I felt about Buzz was that it was trying to beat Twitter by giving users more features. There’s comment, like, email and reply by chat features, along with others such as report abuse and link to post hidden nearby. Twitter neatly handles all these using two simple options – reply and retweet.

Buzz is going to be one Google product that will be hard to sell to me. Apart from the absence of spam bots, there isn’t much I like about it and I’m convinced that I’m better off using Twitter. This post is mostly a Twitter user’s perspective of Buzz, but I suppose it doesn’t have much to offer to the Facebook crowd as well. I’m not actually going to disable Buzz yet, and am watching how it’s going to be improved. But for the time being, my Buzz followers will only see little activity on my account apart from my tweets automatically fetched into Buzz.

What is your take on Buzz? What social networking sites do you use and how does Buzz compare to those?

The posts were moved to the new location a few days ago, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the feeds and that caused quite a bit of delay. I’ve set up the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin to use the same old feedburner feed with this blog, but I’m not sure if it’s working fine. My apologies to all my subscribers if all my older posts are listed again on your feed reader.

Does anybody know the best way to transfer feeds from blogger blogs to a self hosted wordpress site? Have you moved your blog to a new location? If so, how did you transfer the feeds to the new blog?