Tuesday 10 September 2013

G+/Blogger integration, still not there, can we get some real features please?

// It's amazing what insignificant updates make news these days. Up until now, after hitting "Publish" on a new Blogger post, you were prompted to also post it on G+. Now you have an option and this will be done automatically. That's it. That's a new feature, announced on the official Blogger blog, filling up tech news sites and my G+ feed.
Left: post on Blogger. Right: post on G+
So here I am, testing Blogger again, and not much has changed since the last time I was here. I see that some problems remain:

1) Comment management: There is no central place to see all comments (on Blogger and G+ since these are (or more accurate, you can set it this way) the same thing now). You only have a list of posts an a comment count next to them. So you do not have a way to find if an old post has a new comment recently.

That said, if you had shared a Blogger post as a G+ post you get a notification on G+ for new comments but that's it. Comments from re-shares do not produce notifications (from what I have seen, correct me if I'm wrong). Finally, from what +Jean Abraham reports you get a G+ notification when someone comments directly on a post and +Gideon Rosenblatt reports that you get a G+ notification for shares (even if you didn't share it initially on G+?)

2) Smaller real estate on G+ feeds: Your full post (the text of it) is not posted on G+, forcing people to click through to get to the article. Unless you learn to write amazing first paragraphs, you've just lost a large part of your audience (Yes, people love easy stuff! Amazing insight: the easier you make it for people to read your content, the more people will read your content :)). In addition, your smaller thumbnail image has to compete with large photos from "real" G+ posts, some even taking up both columns of the feed.

I really can't see what's stopping Google from doing a full integration of the two services. Full Blogger posts on G+. Your blogspot.com can remain are your categorised archive and holder of "static" Pages content. A real comment management control panel (see WordPress, Disqus, etc). Am I asking too much? :)