Blogger’s hasty exit from Beta
The new Blogger is out of Beta. Defying “conventional” Web 2.0 “wisdom” of a perpetual Beta, the new version of Blogger has been formally launched.
When I read this news, I decided to migrate my Blogger account over to the new version. So I logged in to Blogger with my old username and password, expecting to see a link on my Dashboard giving me the option to migrate. If Blogger was out of Beta, it obviously meant that they had worked out all the kinks around migration of old Blogger accounts over to the new version. And since they could not force-migrate blogs automatically without the bloggers’ knowledge, they would provide means to migrate optionally.
But I was surprised to find no such link/button on the Dashboard. Hmmm… that’s strange, I thought. So I logged off and went to Blogger homepage. There was a button on the generic Blogger homepage that gave the option to switch. So I clicked it and initiated the migration process.
After a minute or two of “in progress” status, it flashed a very generic message stating that an error had occurred that prevented the migration from completing successfully. And that their engineers would look into the problem. There was absolutely no inkling about what the error might’ve been. Just a generic message asking me to look out for a link to migrate that would appear on my Dashboard sometime in the future. In short, the message did not tell me what the problem was and neither did it give me any idea about when the issue might be resolved. That’s a poor poor user experience!
And not just poor user experience. It also shows that issues relating to migration of old blogs have not been addressed fully. And yet, Blogger chose to come out of Beta and launch formally.
All this sounds frighteningly similar to the Microsoft approach of releasing half-baked software full of un-helpful and thoroughly confusing error messages! Personally… I am not concerned that I was not able to migrate over to the new version of Blogger… because my primary blog is right here and it uses WordPress (God bless WordPress!). But looks like in its efforts to compete with Microsoft for the web OS space, Google is hurtling towards becoming a Microsoft clone in all the wrong ways!
7 comments
Came here through your old blog, which incidentally gave me a hit, that too, through the indian bloggers webring link! :P :). So it seems.. hum Qatar mein hain .. ok bad PJ.
Migration in blogs has somehow never been addressed. Pathetic as it is, it just introduces more garbage to the net. I have been using rediffblogs since years now and imagined that when rediff came with rediffiland (which sank without even a pipsqueak), it would at least have the option of migration. But zilch. There was no other option except for starting a new one. Been considering a migration but only once I find an actually stable service provider which would give me flexibility as well as good porting facilities.
True. They oughtn’t to have brought it out of beta so soon, with so many problems still unresolved. However, while WordPress is undoubtedly fabulous, especially if you’re using your own webhost, it is slowly getting increasingly commercialized.
I love wordpress…I switched to it before this blogger beta business came about and glad that I did! It is becoming commercialized, but it is also very user-friendly.
Twilight Fairy>> Aah! the old webring!! Us webring mein toh sab qatar mein hain! :-))
By the way, you’re absolutely right about the poor attention to migration. They just don’t realize that a blog URL is pretty much like a telephone number. changing it causes you to notify so many people! And it plays havoc in the search results too!
You should give Wordpress.com a try. Seriously!
witnwisdumb>> The thing about services on the web is that they need to generate revenue otherwise however useful/popular they may be, they are likely to go under sooner rather than later. So some amount of commercialization is okay, I guess. But as long as free users continue to get decent amount of functionality, I don’t think we need to worry. Also, the non-hosted version of wordpress continues to be free.
Vi>> True! Wordpress is pretty user-friendly. Maybe not as quite as Blogger, but it’s getting user-friendlier by the day. A li’l bit of commercialization is okay. :-)
I had a big trouble when I found that my 3 years old blogger profile URL got changed :(
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