A tale of evolution. How Facebook and I grew apart.
gilest.ro
gilest.ro
I agree that Facebook is horrible, in many ways, and hasn't progressed much at all in any useful or meaningful way (for HN-type users), but Google, while having the tools, needs to apply them better to win over the market.
Hell, I'm desperate to lead my non-geek chums over Facebook's horizon, but Gooogle's apps aren't there yet. Heaven only knows why, though :-/
I don't know what google plans really are: I don't know whether buzz is so unfriendly because they want to target a different audience or simply because they don't see much future in it.
Reader is a good tool. It's faster than the aggregators I tried in the past (netvibes mainly), it works on my phone and it has a smart stumblupon-like feature that is promising.
You need to limit your Facebook friends. Having too many FB friends mimics the feeling of being overly fakely social: You get much more closeness if you stick to the people you really care about. Stop treating it like a monolithic connection. Friend and unfriend people whimsically. Stick to people you really care about interacting with.
Facebook is about the social. If you're not using it as a strictly conversational tool, then it doesn't work well. (Other than sending messages, but whatever.) It's not for documenting links, or documenting conversation. It's about today rather than last week or last month.
And no other tool handles that as well. Tumblr doesn't handle conversations well, Twitter doesn't handle multimedia well. Buzz is hideous and bad and it gives me skin-crawlies; plus I don't have a Google account. If there was a similarly social service, I'd consider moving over, but there's not.