I wanted to agree with you, and I'm only on Facebook because of non-geek friends, but I survive with twitter, newsfox (Firefox plug-in), and tumblr -- sometimes sharing via dropbox. Buzz is, unfortunately, a vacuum. And Google Reader for some reason doesn't quite work for me over Newsfox.
I agree that Facebook is horrible, in many ways, and hasn't progressed much at all in any useful or meaningful way (for HN-type users), but Google, while having the tools, needs to apply them better to win over the market.
Hell, I'm desperate to lead my non-geek chums over Facebook's horizon, but Gooogle's apps aren't there yet. Heaven only knows why, though :-/
In a way I hope your non-geek friends will never join buzz because I definitely experienced facebook jump of the shark exactly when my grandmother and her tea friends started joining.
I don't know what google plans really are: I don't know whether buzz is so unfriendly because they want to target a different audience or simply because they don't see much future in it.
Reader is a good tool. It's faster than the aggregators I tried in the past (netvibes mainly), it works on my phone and it has a smart stumblupon-like feature that is promising.
Every friend I have left (51 at current count) has expressed doubts re: Facebook use, and has contemplated switching to something. Every one came to the conclusion that the disadvantages to switching far outweigh the advantages of switching; more, there's no real competitor to switch.
You need to limit your Facebook friends. Having too many FB friends mimics the feeling of being overly fakely social: You get much more closeness if you stick to the people you really care about. Stop treating it like a monolithic connection. Friend and unfriend people whimsically. Stick to people you really care about interacting with.
Facebook is about the social. If you're not using it as a strictly conversational tool, then it doesn't work well. (Other than sending messages, but whatever.) It's not for documenting links, or documenting conversation. It's about today rather than last week or last month.
And no other tool handles that as well. Tumblr doesn't handle conversations well, Twitter doesn't handle multimedia well. Buzz is hideous and bad and it gives me skin-crawlies; plus I don't have a Google account. If there was a similarly social service, I'd consider moving over, but there's not.
I having waiting forever for google to support search operators in its reader. I get by by dumping my entire feed locally. But there really should have been a way to do this on their server side.
I agree that Facebook is horrible, in many ways, and hasn't progressed much at all in any useful or meaningful way (for HN-type users), but Google, while having the tools, needs to apply them better to win over the market.
Hell, I'm desperate to lead my non-geek chums over Facebook's horizon, but Gooogle's apps aren't there yet. Heaven only knows why, though :-/