Category — Internet

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!