Will “Following” Give Blogger a Boost?
Google’s hoping to pack more punch into its Blogger publishing platform with a soon-to-be-added ability to have FriendFeed-style “followers” on your blog.
The feature will look familiar. Anyone with a Google account, it seems, can opt to follow a blog. Then the site owner can add a widget with all the followers’ mugshots to the front page.
Where Google gains an advantage, though, is with its integration into other properties: Any blogs you, as a reader, opt to follow will appear in a special folder in your Google Reader — and you can also click on any blogs already in your Reader and subscribe to them as a follower from right there. Google is also working on building a tie-in with FriendConnect, its social tool introduced this past May, so Blogger sites can use it to add another set of social features to their blogs as well.
So will the add-ons drive the masses over to Blogger for hosting? Of course not. But for sites already hosted there, it’ll add a new layer of interaction and some extra room for social growth. For the casual blogger content hosting his or her site with Google, at least, it’ll be an interesting option to gain.
