Listen up kids. Let me tell you a little story about the blogging explosion. The year was 2007 and blogging was going from ‘that thing techy people did’ to main stream. Programs like Blogger made it easy and free to have a blog up in MINUTES. And everyone under the sun- thought ‘hey I want one of those!’…soon after we all became pretty interested in what others were writing, and we started to keep lists of our favorite blogs. And then came the reader. It allowed us to keep track of those favorites and read the content RIGHT THERE without having to jump around from site to site.
But bloggers figured out those readers weren’t affecting their page views, and changed their settings to limited view- now our favorite blogs only gave little teasers in the reader forcing us to click over to their site to see the entire post. Still readers were a smart way to organize sites and blogs we wanted to stay in touch with…and then it wasn’t anymore.
As the number of blogs grew it was impossible to stay on top of all of our favorites even with the use of a reader. We tried. But it came with a dose of guilt since no matter how dedicated we were- we couldn’t read them all. And we certainly couldn’t comment on them all….
So what did we do instead?
As reader usage was declining- social network usage was increasing. The blog list you see to the left is my personal list from around 2010.
(I had not logged into Google Reader until today to write this post. )
Today I am connected to these writers and blogs on Facebook and Twitter. They all share links to their posts- and I click over to read if it interests me. Then I comment on Facebook- often entering into full conversations with other readers and making the discussion feel real time and relevant.
So the question people have is ‘Why kill it Google?’…to a Google Plus advocate the answer is pretty obvious. With every killing of an extraneous site or arm of the Google empire, we see potential for it to be folded into the G+ platform. Blogger is already connected to G+ and post publishing and following will not be far off. Remember I am the gal who said this (here)
“Think about this- You Tube, Google Search, Picasa, Blogger, Picnik, Google Earth, Google maps, Gmail, Google Docs, Motorola Mobility and MORE. Chances are- even outside of their dominant search platform you are using a Google property in some way nearly every day online. And once G+ is fully realized, it will be the connector to all of these applications. Complete sync and share across the many platforms will make working within the Google world easy, intuitive and joyful.
I no longer encourage people to join Google+. I don’t have to- because before long, you will have a need to be part of it.”
Everything predicted is happening. Sure change is painful. But the end result will be a seamless social experience- allowing you to read your favorite blog posts within a social stream. No longer having to toggle back and forth.
So before you get too upset with Google- try to realize, this might turn out to be a very good thing for all of us.
Still in a panic? Try Feedly.com as a replacement : )
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