Blogger Gets More Social, Get Excited!

Today Caroline McCarthy posted about a new feature which is being added to Blogger-based blogs and makes them inherently more social. It’s a simple widget-like feature which enables you to view other people in the network that are following that blog. It is extremely similar to the MyBlogLog community features and it extends Google Friend Connect.

One interesting thing about this new feature is that you can import the “Blogs I’m Following” directly into your Google Reader. I’m not quite sure how useful this feature is for me since a large portion of the blogs I’m reading aren’t hosted by Blogger but I figure a lot of people will begin using it. The shift toward a more social web is clearly continuing and Google is one of the companies leading the push.

The only problem with this new feature is that it doesn’t extend to blogs outside of Google. I want a single identity and a single community on the web and this surely isn’t a step in that direction. Then again we can’t make all of our decisions with data portability as the primary end-goal. Now you have yet one more way to interact with people you don’t know on the web thanks to Blogger!

What does the future hold for social blogs? You’ve got me! It’s Friday so I’ll leave you all to figure out the future of the social web. Everybody, including Google, appears to like throwing kinks in the whole equation. With all this socializing taking place on the web it’s too complicated to figure how it all will end up in the end given that it’s the Friday before a 3-day weekend!

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.