Google has once again prevailed over all and sundry. Even as rumors of Facebook getting ready to challenge Google’s gmail began to float in the air, Google delivered Buzz, which looks to be a certain Twitter killer. Why should I log in to another site to use a service that only a small subset of my friends use, if an existing site which is already an integral part of my online life offers the same features, albeit better designed, promises to be more robust, does away with silly things like character limits and makes it possible for virtually all of my friends to stay connected with me? It even allows me to hook up with my twitter account which means I’ll continue to stay in touch with all my tweeple friends.

I see almost all my friends embracing Buzz completely. The light blue twitter page might well have become the latest ‘dead blue screen’ like the proverbial BSOD. Incidentally, I heard about Buzz a couple of days ago, for the first time, on Brad Fitz’s Lj page mentioning that its possible to have comments and contents flowing between lj and Buzz. I’m certainly looking forward to that.

The other thing I’m looking forward to is the end of that irritating use of shortened URLs using services offered by the likes of tinyurl and bit.ly. While it’s practical in certain cases, it was almost a must for twitter users as they had to learn to live with a ridiculous 140 character limit! This meant using urls which conveyed nothing about the contents of the link, a feature which was devastatingly effective for all those spammers selling blue pills at deep discounts. So bad were the spam and phishing attacks from users using these url changing services that many corporate firewalls just blocked these provider sites. This meant that when a friend tweeted a bit.ly link, not only did the url mean nothing to me but I could not even access the link unless I used an anonymous proxy site, something that is heavily frowned upon. But all that seems to be ancient history now. Buzz is here, and it seems that it’s here to stay. RIP Twitter. So long, Facebook.

I’m also looking forward to using the mobile version of lj (m.livejournal.com). If you are reading this post, it means I successfully posted it from my mobile :-) Yes, I typed this whole post on my mobile phone, having only the t9 dictionary for help! Considering that I don’t write in ‘sms’ese, that certainly translates into a whole lot of presses on my mobile’s keypad! How I wish I had one of those smart phones with touch screen and optical character recognition! Sigh!

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com