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Google: Blogger To Embrace OpenID, Google Reader Recommends “Drag And Drop”

Google: Blogger To Embrace OpenID, Google Reader Recommends “Drag And Drop”

While Google is being hailed for embracing openness regarding its wireless bid (not to mention its phone software), it looks as if that philosophy has infected Blogger (aka blog*spot).

The Blogger team has recently begun experimenting with OpenID, allowing users from AOL, LiveJournal, WordPress.com and Typepad to post comments using their own ID’s, or any registered OpenID that they may have.

(Blogger in Draft) Blogger in Draft now lets you enable OpenID-based commenting, in your blogs’ Settings | Comments tab: […]

This means that users of OpenID-enabled services — such as LiveJournal and WordPress — can comment on your blog using their accounts from those sites, rather than with Blogger/Google accounts[.]

As TechCrunch noted, hopefully Google’s entrance into the field will make OpenID popular for geeks and non-geeks alike, especially social networks (as there are too many to register for IMHO).

But Blogger is not the only update Google has made to its services. Google has also made it slightly easier to use Google Reader by adding not only a “drag and drop” feature, but recommending blogs/news sites for users to subscribe to as well.

(Google Reader Blog) To help with the discovery of interesting sites to subscribe to, we just released personalized recommendations in Reader. When you visit our discovery page, you’ll see quite a few feeds that we think you may find interesting. “Interesting” here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. […]

Recommendations make it even easier to subscribe to lots of feeds, so then the question becomes: how do you organize those feeds better? As luck would have it, one of the other features we’re announcing today is drag-and-drop support for your subscriptions and folders. You can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list.

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While the drag and drop feature may be Google’s way of staying ahead of Bloglines (which implemented this within their beta a few months before), their recommendations may either having you thanking your Google overlords or screaming big brother.

Either way Google continues to push innovation within the blogosphere, and whether you love them or hate them, it seems that you can not simply ignore them–at least until Microsoft gets its game on.

View Comments (12)
  • This is interesting, I just noticed yesterday that Blogger blogs no longer give me the option to enter my name and URL manually. I’m not sure if this is across the board or an optional thing, by now it is Google or “nickname” only. I already thought it was unreasonable that I could not provide my email if I wanted to, a function I value on my own blog, but not being able to provide a link to my site? That’s just not the way the blogosphere operates. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. This is such a roadblock to creating communities and building connections.

    OpenID is all very well, but having a quick look at it, I don’t want to have to sign up for yet another service.

    Let’s just say – I’m not happy.

  • I’m with cerebralmum on this one — what kind of blog, or blogging functionality, doesn’t allow you to enter your own url?

    Unless OpenID incorporates personal URL than fooey on that. I don’t really like OpenID anyway — forces me to use the same username accross all sites. Forces me to give away privacy and flexibility with how I “brand” myself.

  • @ Cerebralmum and RO: I just noticed this myself. I’ll see if I can comment about this on another article.

    Hopefully this is just a bug, as I enjoyed posting a domain in the field, not just an anonymous ID.

    ~Darnell

  • I totally agree with cerebralmum and authormomwithdogs. I dislike having to sign up for another service just to be able to link back to my own blog, which doesn’t happen to be through google. I’d already noticed this on friend’s blogs, and been annoyed by it. It’s not a good trend.

  • […]Don’t take this lying down. For those of you on Blogger, what this means is that you’ve probably already noticed some drop-off in comments, and could eventually experience a drop-off in non-Blogger readers, because of their frustration at being blocked from signing in with their own url and from not wanting to be forced to sign up for a service that does not serve them.[…]

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