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Google Buzz is a good idea that has a few problems. Until they fix those problems, I am off. Not sure how much harm is already done. Hope it is not not much.

My gmail account is personal. A lot of my family and friends are listed there. When I open up it doesn’t mean I am opening up the profile of my friends and family. I also do not want any one to follow me and get access to my non public information.

The default setting for any application in this century should be a closed one. Unless it is a stand alone one where you explicitly open a new account, like twitter. Facebook is pretty closed. I like it that way. Twitter is open and I like it that way. Buzz right now is neither and I don’t like it.

It feels like buzz was rolled out in a hurry unlike all other stuff rolled out by Google. I don’t remember seeing any closed beta for it.

As soon as I enabled buzz, I posted on twitter that “Not everyone considers friend and follower the same. Do buzz differentiate those?”. Now it sounds like the whole web is saying the same thing.

For now buzz is turned off in my gmail.

Update 2/15/2010: Just re-enabled buzz. On that later.

I have added ads to this site recently. I did not want those ads change the look of my theme. One way to achieve this for text based ads is to have a transparent background. Google AdSense ad setup did not have a way to express that. Backgound color is required is only RGB. All the ads made the site look terrible than it already is. Luckily for me I am not using gradient colors over a large area. The background image is a small rectangle that is tiled. I changed the background color to match the background image and it looks better than standard colors.

If you have gradient backgound spanning a large area or have a background image that is not uniform color try to place ads outside of those areas. You can probably create a bar or box with borders that will blend with the rest of the site. The best way to work around the problem is to come with a color scheme that will allow you to place ads in a more acceptable manner.