Why blog on (Google) Blogger?

My main target was the service for good personal blogging – mainly to eliminate the need to IM all bits of personal news to all of my friends :) Therefore, some social networking feature were desired too , but they were second to blogging.

So, quick search turned out several most known candidates:

Facebook

This one is very good and most popular one. However, it requires mandatory registration even to read the public posts, and I don’t want to impose this on all people I want to share with. Also, it requires users to disclose real names. Personally, I think this is a bad idea. Even when they have privacy settings, all it takes a one leak, and you can never remove info about you that leaked to internet. I don’t want my prospective employers to sniff googling my Facebook pages (yes, a lot of them do this these days) ;)

Also taking into account the above, it’s quite limiting that Facebook has no distinction between “real” and “internet” friends, and personally I think these things are quite different except common name.

Myspace

Provides more privacy, and does not require people to sign in to access public profiles/blogs. However its blog support is shockingly basic, starting from (lack of) visual style. This is quite surprising taking into account that profile page can be customized very well. But not the blog. Oh well.

Twitter

Mainly usable only for short text snippets. I prefer rarer, but more verbose posting.

Livejournal

Very decent blog engine and plenty social networking features. However, it’s not *very* popular – and seem to lag to significant extent from Western countries. Also I am not sure about its potential stability, considering all developments with it.

Wordpress

This one also has the good blog engine. But – for visual customization/styles, you must purchase the paid subscription. And predefined themes are no good, and too little of them. Since I wanted my blog to have the style I wanted, it was no go.

Blogger

Has very reputable backing (google). Therefore, it has absolutely no problems with hosting/reachability. Good integration with other google services (picasa, etc). Complete visual customization – down too low-level CSS, and for free – plethora of ready-to use (and very good-designed) visual styles available. Blogger supports OpenID, so Blogger account is interoperable with other OpenID-compatible sites (as Livejournal). Social networking features are somewhat lacking, but can be implemented by customization – also its quite easy to integrate content from it into profiles on other “proper” social networking sites as Live, Facebook, Myspace.

Windows Live

This is a good one, however is too integrated between Messenger, Mail, Spaces, SkyDrive. Also, sadly most part of Live services are blocked at our office – and because of tight integration I can’t access almost any of it from office when signed in. And it has no OpenID support (at least, for now). Not much of custom visual styling can be done either (even when some default themes I liked).

Conclusion

So, based on all above, the Blogger was decided on pretty quickly. Trial run turned out to be quite successful, and now I am here :)

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