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? :)

Blogger and the Holy Grail of unified comments

// So yesterday Google announced a further integration of Google+ comments and Blogger. If you enable the related setting, if your Blogger post is shared on G+, any comment on the G+ post with your post will also be shown in the page of the Blogger post in the comments section.

This is a Holy Grail for comments on Google+ for people like who use Google+ as a blogging platform, as you can have all (public) comments from re-shares on your original post both to read (if you have many re-shares usually you just don't follow discussion there) as well as respond to.

So this is a post written and first post on Blogger at mgiannopoulos.blogspot.com. I'm not sure where this will lead as not everything is peachy.

First of all, I've been looking for some good premium themes that would have the same look as my current setup at giannopoulos.net but have not found anything decent. Any suggestions here would be great.

The other issue I see is that, when you share a new post to G+ at the time of publishing (while you're on Blogger), you actually create a G+ post which contains a link to the blogger post. This mean that my current G+ followers, who were used to seeing my full posts (complete text and image) on their stream, will now see just a link (and perhaps some intro that I write while sharing). This is less compelling to click through.

On top of that, I would not be able to share a Blogger post on G+ communities without being marked a spammer :) Currently it is generally acceptable to share your own G+ post in a community since you're still keeping people on the platform and they can read the full post inline. See the screenshot above for a terrible "inception" effect :)

So as it is, I'm sceptical on whether this could work. My G+ audience is well, on G+. Sending them to Blogger in order to have all discussions in a single place could actually be counter-productive. Thoughts? :)


[Update] When someone replies directly on your Blogger post (not through a share), you get a notification on Google+ :)