

Bringing Google+ Comments to Blogger - timothya
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/bringing-google-comments-to-blogger.html

======
simonsarris
Well this is a first step. This and more is long overdue but its a start.

I love Google+ because it seems to encourage much more in the way of long-form
status updates, and public followers are much more "OK" than they ever were
for Facebook. A lot of people use G+ as a de-facto blog.

For exmaple see Tom Anderson of MySpace fame (he also takes a lot of pretty
photos): <https://plus.google.com/+myspacetom/posts>

Look at his posts. That's a blog. Isn't that a blog?

Now that they've got this honestly great market differentiating feature (from
FB), why on _earth_ hasn't blogger been subsumed into G+ to make an actually
good blogging platform?

A powerful network of profiles and blogs where people can easily
share/comment/solicit collaboration? That would be _amazing._ Easily better
than svbtle.

Come on Google+, marry Blogger already. You could be a powerhouse of
storytelling in a way that Facebook wishes it could be.

~~~
incision
I generally agree.

For everything done right with G+ there's something else which I'd say is
plainly wrong or a huge oversight.

For example, Communities do a good job of facilitating limited sharing beyond
your circles but they were implemented without support for posting from mobile
and no option to prevent public community posts from being included in your
public stream.

Both of those things have since been fixed, but I think it speaks to the same
thing we're seeing here - Incomplete or outright lacking features that hurt
obvious, compelling uses of the platform. Tom there is running a blog on G+
despite the lack of basic functions for formatting, linking and categorizing
posts.

~~~
mtgx
Someone had an idea of integrating Communities into Wordpress blogs, too, as
sort of a forum replacement. I thought it was a pretty good idea, since they
kind of act that way. You get "groups" of post, and then you can see
everyone's post as a forum thread.

I'd much rather implement something like that than BBPress.

------
turing
Being able to see all of the conversations about a story dispersed across the
entire G+ network is _very_ cool. I would love to see this incorporated into
other sites.

~~~
abekarpinski
Yeah, but it will probably become very messy if an article gets any kind of
movement.

from my experience on G+ people don't correspond as coharently as they do on
blogs themselves.

~~~
ok_craig
> coharently

This is the first time I've observed irony in a single word.

~~~
iso8859-1
grammer! :)

------
taeric
Also, yet another way to try and strong arm folks into having an active
google+ account. :)

Honestly, the biggest thing I do not like about this is how we are essentially
breaking away at folks ability to shard their community involvements. Not a
huge deal, I realize. However, many of my friends and family could give two
craps about technical discussions. Which is why they are not already on sites
such as this. :)

~~~
Siecje
When I read the comment to merge Google+ and Blogger I thought it was a good
idea.

But you're right, my friends and family in my social network don't all want to
see my blog posts, which is why I don't share my new blog posts.

~~~
jholman
Okay, this is seriously THE use-case for Google+ Circles. I hate to boost G+,
but it's basically perfect for the problem you describe.

~~~
ydant
Circles are backwards for this, though. _I_ shouldn't have to choose who I
share my public posts with. Circles are great for posts I want to limit to a
certain subset of people - e.g. semi-private conversations / photos about my
friends that I'm not posting to Public. For posts where it's other people who
want to do the limiting, I would like a way of categorizing my posts. A simple
tag, or "public circle" would suffice. Let people subscribe to my "mountain
biking" public circle (or tag), and I can post to that circle. Then people
have the choice to either subscribe to everything I post or a subset based on
their interests.

I would use that feature a lot and would re-add a lot of the celebrity posters
if they properly tagged their posts. But since they don't have a way to do
that and I don't have a way to limit their posts based on a filter they get
shoved into a circle of "following, but not really" that I rarely check.

~~~
taeric
This is exactly what I've tried pitching to some friends. Of course, this is
also in the "the web already had a method for this." It was even supported in
blogger, where people would "tag" their posts.

------
mindcrime
Just turned this on for the Fogbeam blog, and so far, I like it. It's nice to
pull together both the G+ related comments and the "native" blog comments in
one place.

And while I certainly have my issues[1] with Google and G+, I generally like
G+ more than Facebook and if this helps encourage adoption of it, so much the
better in that regard.

Just c'mon, Google, give us access to our social graph using FOAF, ability to
subscribe to Circles / Streams / Groups / whatever using RSS, ability to add
an RSS feed to a Circle / Group / etc., and a Write API based on AtomPub.
Throw in SIOC for the commenting stuff, and we're BFF's again. :0)

[1]: [http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-
wil...](http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-will-defend-
open.html)

------
Shooti
Hate to invoke "Godwin's law: Reader edition", but it seems a bit bizarre that
they didn't integrate a flavor of this G+ comment system into Reader before
calling it quits as they seem symbiotic at first glance.

EDIT: Thinking about it some more that would have the potential of turning
Reader into a spammer/trolls paradise, so I guess the effectiveness of such a
fusion is a bit more nuanced.

~~~
acdha
It was obvious that they wanted to kill Reader, as has been confirmed by many
of the people who worked on it. The initial Google+ implementation was
mediocre and no attempt was made to improve it – there were basic flaws like
+1 sharing not working at all on mobile which went unfixed for at least a
year.

------
atesti
Does this new activity mean that Blogger will not be shut down in some "spring
cleaning" in autumn?

~~~
sergiosgc
It means Google will divert traffic from Blogger to G+ before spring cleaning
Blogger.

~~~
greyman
They can't do that, Blogger is too widespread already.

------
dave1010uk
How will web authors choose between Discus, Facebook comments and Google+
comments?

~~~
mtgx
I would go with G+ comments _immediately_ over Disqus. I imagine most
Google/Android news websites would, too (there are a lot of them). Facebook
comments is horrible. It's the main reason why I quit visiting TechCrunch a
long time ago.

~~~
Andrex
Yeah, Facebook comments are what originally drove me away from TechCrunch. It
was actually a blessing as the site took a nosedive in content quality around
that time anyways.

Disqus has been making some poor moves lately as well, I don't like their new
embedded comment form and surprising everybody with stealth ads is just bad
taste.

------
josephscott
This has me wondering if Google+ will eventually consume all of Blogger.

