I'm normally a BIG fan of just about anything Google does (well, except for that China thing), but they've missed the boat on this one. It really is a "beta," and not much of one at that.
Why am I kvetching about this on an AIDS blog? Well, it's a blog--and Blogger is what we have to work with right now. Either I learn a lot more about CSS and HTML than I ever wanted to know so we can have a better interface here, or the Blogger team (which already knows this stuff) makes it work for us.
Here's what's missing:
- Better templates (the instructions are not clear to a novice, the options are too limited, where are the new ones?)
- More features (it's nice that Blogger is finally going to add categories and blog rolls, but where is the connection to Google Earth or Calendar or all those other features?)
- Privacy issues (I'm blogging with my real name because this is an "official" blog; what about folks who want some pseudonymity in their blogging? what about folks who have both official and personal blogs? linking everything to your Gmail account makes it hard to keep those separate)
- Three columns (duh!)
- Statistics (duh!)
There are probably more issues, but these are the ones that popped up on the first pass. I think we'll wait until the "beta" goes away before looking at it again.
/rant
