Friday, January 08, 2016

Goodbye followers!



Google HQ plan their next Blogger enhancement


On Monday it looks like Google will start making it impossible for people to follow blogs on Blogger without a Google account.

"As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count. We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow. We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.

Now although I have a Google account I do not put anything on my Google page  because I don't know what it is for except for extracting commercially valuable data.  I only joined it because there were one or two blogs I wanted to do but couldn't without having an account.  Many people, I suspect, don't want a Google account and so these people will start dropping off our followers list.  Maybe someone with more IT knowledge than me has a comment on this.

11 comments:

  1. How stupid??? Google are trying to flex their muscled....again????

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  2. I just don't understand why they would feel the need to do this? It just seems spiteful.

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  3. I highly suggest using Feedly for all blog related following stuff. Much better than what Google is currently offering.

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  4. I have a google account but usually use an aggregator (Digg) so no effect.

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  5. This has always been Google's long term plan, to gradually shut out everyone who doesn't want their data mined (ie, everyone who doesn't have a Google account).

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  6. Curious, things like this usually backfire on the 'brilliant minds' that think them up. Blogs are funny in that once you start them the content (history) is more important to you and the community you build that the hosting

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  7. google did the same to youtube , so u had to have a google account to log in , store faves etc . Thanks to them I lost years of favourite movie clips and ''pop'' vids ...

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  8. News to me - I did notice few less "Followers" recently - thought they got tired of my lack of posts :) The internet - can't live with it, nor without it :)

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