4 ms·

Bringing Google+ Comments to Blogger

51 points by timothya 13y ago

turing 13y ago
Being able to see all of the conversations about a story dispersed across the entire G+ network is very cool. I would love to see this incorporated into other sites.
- abekarpinski 13y ago
  Yeah, but it will probably become very messy if an article gets any kind of movement. from my experience on G+ people don't correspond as coharently as they do on blogs themselves.
  - ok_craig 13y ago
    > coharently This is the first time I've observed irony in a single word.
    - iso8859-1 13y ago
      grammer! :)
dave1010uk 13y ago
How will web authors choose between Discus, Facebook comments and Google+ comments?
- mtgx 13y ago
  I would go with G+ comments immediately over Disqus. I imagine most Google/Android news websites would, too (there are a lot of them). Facebook comments is horrible. It's the main reason why I quit visiting TechCrunch a long time ago.
  - Andrex 13y ago
    Yeah, Facebook comments are what originally drove me away from TechCrunch. It was actually a blessing as the site took a nosedive in content quality around that time anyways. Disqus has been making some poor moves lately as well, I don't like their new embedded comment form and surprising everybody with stealth ads is just bad taste.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  I've written a lot of articles comparing comment systems. (such as [1] comparing LiveFyre, Disqus, and FB comments) Both Facebook and Google+ comment systems prevent users from commenting anonymously. Some might consider this a good thing, but the comment count is cut drastically, which big blogs don't seem to like. Both systems have zero-click login, which is good for UX. (they don't have to register for another site) Disqus and other related comments systems like LiveFyre have unique features like media embedding and live updating. And can interact with any social media service. I'm partial to Facebook/Google+ comments for the reasons stated above, but Facebook hasn't updated their comment system in literally 2 years. There's a lot of missed potential. [1] http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/ http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/ EDIT: Looking at the implementation on Google's blog, Google does something that Facebook can't: they syndicate all posts on G+ linking to the blog post and integrate it into the comments section themselves. I'm not sure if this creates spam or now. Additionally, since it goes the other way, each G+ comment on a post increases the G+ share counter by 1. Good for metrics.
- hosay123 13y ago
  They could always, you know, run their own..
josephscott 13y ago
This has me wondering if Google+ will eventually consume all of Blogger.
taeric 13y ago
Also, yet another way to try and strong arm folks into having an active google+ account. :) Honestly, the biggest thing I do not like about this is how we are essentially breaking away at folks ability to shard their community involvements. Not a huge deal, I realize. However, many of my friends and family could give two craps about technical discussions. Which is why they are not already on sites such as this. :)
- Siecje 13y ago
  When I read the comment to merge Google+ and Blogger I thought it was a good idea. But you're right, my friends and family in my social network don't all want to see my blog posts, which is why I don't share my new blog posts.
  - jholman 13y ago
    Okay, this is seriously THE use-case for Google+ Circles. I hate to boost G+, but it's basically perfect for the problem you describe.
    - ydant 13y ago
      Circles are backwards for this, though. I shouldn't have to choose who I share my public posts with. Circles are great for posts I want to limit to a certain subset of people - e.g. semi-private conversations / photos about my friends that I'm not posting to Public. For posts where it's other people who want to do the limiting, I would like a way of categorizing my posts. A simple tag, or "public circle" would suffice. Let people subscribe to my "mountain biking" public circle (or tag), and I can post to that circle. Then people have the choice to either subscribe to everything I post or a subset based on their interests. I would use that feature a lot and would re-add a lot of the celebrity posters if they properly tagged their posts. But since they don't have a way to do that and I don't have a way to limit their posts based on a filter they get shoved into a circle of "following, but not really" that I rarely check.
      - taeric 13y ago
simonsarris 13y ago
Well this is a first step. This and more is long overdue but its a start. I love Google+ because it seems to encourage much more in the way of long-form status updates, and public followers are much more "OK" than they ever were for Facebook. A lot of people use G+ as a de-facto blog. For exmaple see Tom Anderson of MySpace fame (he also takes a lot of pretty photos): https://plus.google.com/+myspacetom/posts https://plus.google.com/+myspacetom/posts Look at his posts. That's a blog. Isn't that a blog? Now that they've got this honestly great market differentiating feature (from FB), why on earth hasn't blogger been subsumed into G+ to make an actually good blogging platform? A powerful network of profiles and blogs where people can easily share/comment/solicit collaboration? That would be amazing. Easily better than svbtle. Come on Google+, marry Blogger already. You could be a powerhouse of storytelling in a way that Facebook wishes it could be.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- incision 13y ago
  I generally agree. For everything done right with G+ there's something else which I'd say is plainly wrong or a huge oversight. For example, Communities do a good job of facilitating limited sharing beyond your circles but they were implemented without support for posting from mobile and no option to prevent public community posts from being included in your public stream. Both of those things have since been fixed, but I think it speaks to the same thing we're seeing here - Incomplete or outright lacking features that hurt obvious, compelling uses of the platform. Tom there is running a blog on G+ despite the lack of basic functions for formatting, linking and categorizing posts.
  - mtgx 13y ago
    Someone had an idea of integrating Communities into Wordpress blogs, too, as sort of a forum replacement. I thought it was a pretty good idea, since they kind of act that way. You get "groups" of post, and then you can see everyone's post as a forum thread. I'd much rather implement something like that than BBPress.
Shooti 13y ago
Hate to invoke "Godwin's law: Reader edition", but it seems a bit bizarre that they didn't integrate a flavor of this G+ comment system into Reader before calling it quits as they seem symbiotic at first glance. EDIT: Thinking about it some more that would have the potential of turning Reader into a spammer/trolls paradise, so I guess the effectiveness of such a fusion is a bit more nuanced.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Even though G+ doesn't allow anonymity, it doesn't mean that comments will be high quality.
- acdha 13y ago
  It was obvious that they wanted to kill Reader, as has been confirmed by many of the people who worked on it. The initial Google+ implementation was mediocre and no attempt was made to improve it – there were basic flaws like +1 sharing not working at all on mobile which went unfixed for at least a year.
atesti 13y ago
Does this new activity mean that Blogger will not be shut down in some "spring cleaning" in autumn?
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  It means Google will divert traffic from Blogger to G+ before spring cleaning Blogger.
  - greyman 13y ago
    They can't do that, Blogger is too widespread already.
mindcrime 13y ago
Just turned this on for the Fogbeam blog, and so far, I like it. It's nice to pull together both the G+ related comments and the "native" blog comments in one place. And while I certainly have my issues[1] with Google and G+, I generally like G+ more than Facebook and if this helps encourage adoption of it, so much the better in that regard. Just c'mon, Google, give us access to our social graph using FOAF, ability to subscribe to Circles / Streams / Groups / whatever using RSS, ability to add an RSS feed to a Circle / Group / etc., and a Write API based on AtomPub. Throw in SIOC for the commenting stuff, and we're BFF's again. :0) [1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-will-defend-open.html http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-wil...

51 points by timothya 13y ago

Being able to see all of the conversations about a story dispersed across the entire G+ network is very cool. I would love to see this incorporated into other sites.

abekarpinski 13y ago
Yeah, but it will probably become very messy if an article gets any kind of movement. from my experience on G+ people don't correspond as coharently as they do on blogs themselves.
- ok_craig 13y ago
  > coharently This is the first time I've observed irony in a single word.
  - iso8859-1 13y ago
    grammer! :)

dave1010uk 13y ago

How will web authors choose between Discus, Facebook comments and Google+ comments?

mtgx 13y ago
I would go with G+ comments immediately over Disqus. I imagine most Google/Android news websites would, too (there are a lot of them). Facebook comments is horrible. It's the main reason why I quit visiting TechCrunch a long time ago.
- Andrex 13y ago
  Yeah, Facebook comments are what originally drove me away from TechCrunch. It was actually a blessing as the site took a nosedive in content quality around that time anyways. Disqus has been making some poor moves lately as well, I don't like their new embedded comment form and surprising everybody with stealth ads is just bad taste.
minimaxir 13y ago
I've written a lot of articles comparing comment systems. (such as [1] comparing LiveFyre, Disqus, and FB comments) Both Facebook and Google+ comment systems prevent users from commenting anonymously. Some might consider this a good thing, but the comment count is cut drastically, which big blogs don't seem to like. Both systems have zero-click login, which is good for UX. (they don't have to register for another site) Disqus and other related comments systems like LiveFyre have unique features like media embedding and live updating. And can interact with any social media service. I'm partial to Facebook/Google+ comments for the reasons stated above, but Facebook hasn't updated their comment system in literally 2 years. There's a lot of missed potential. [1] http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/ http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/ EDIT: Looking at the implementation on Google's blog, Google does something that Facebook can't: they syndicate all posts on G+ linking to the blog post and integrate it into the comments section themselves. I'm not sure if this creates spam or now. Additionally, since it goes the other way, each G+ comment on a post increases the G+ share counter by 1. Good for metrics.
hosay123 13y ago
They could always, you know, run their own..

josephscott 13y ago

This has me wondering if Google+ will eventually consume all of Blogger.

taeric 13y ago

Also, yet another way to try and strong arm folks into having an active google+ account. :) Honestly, the biggest thing I do not like about this is how we are essentially breaking away at folks ability to shard their community involvements. Not a huge deal, I realize. However, many of my friends and family could give two craps about technical discussions. Which is why they are not already on sites such as this. :)

Siecje 13y ago
When I read the comment to merge Google+ and Blogger I thought it was a good idea. But you're right, my friends and family in my social network don't all want to see my blog posts, which is why I don't share my new blog posts.
- jholman 13y ago
  Okay, this is seriously THE use-case for Google+ Circles. I hate to boost G+, but it's basically perfect for the problem you describe.
  - ydant 13y ago
    Circles are backwards for this, though. I shouldn't have to choose who I share my public posts with. Circles are great for posts I want to limit to a certain subset of people - e.g. semi-private conversations / photos about my friends that I'm not posting to Public. For posts where it's other people who want to do the limiting, I would like a way of categorizing my posts. A simple tag, or "public circle" would suffice. Let people subscribe to my "mountain biking" public circle (or tag), and I can post to that circle. Then people have the choice to either subscribe to everything I post or a subset based on their interests. I would use that feature a lot and would re-add a lot of the celebrity posters if they properly tagged their posts. But since they don't have a way to do that and I don't have a way to limit their posts based on a filter they get shoved into a circle of "following, but not really" that I rarely check.
    - taeric 13y ago

simonsarris 13y ago

Well this is a first step. This and more is long overdue but its a start. I love Google+ because it seems to encourage much more in the way of long-form status updates, and public followers are much more "OK" than they ever were for Facebook. A lot of people use G+ as a de-facto blog. For exmaple see Tom Anderson of MySpace fame (he also takes a lot of pretty photos): https://plus.google.com/+myspacetom/posts https://plus.google.com/+myspacetom/posts Look at his posts. That's a blog. Isn't that a blog? Now that they've got this honestly great market differentiating feature (from FB), why on earth hasn't blogger been subsumed into G+ to make an actually good blogging platform? A powerful network of profiles and blogs where people can easily share/comment/solicit collaboration? That would be amazing. Easily better than svbtle. Come on Google+, marry Blogger already. You could be a powerhouse of storytelling in a way that Facebook wishes it could be.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
incision 13y ago
I generally agree. For everything done right with G+ there's something else which I'd say is plainly wrong or a huge oversight. For example, Communities do a good job of facilitating limited sharing beyond your circles but they were implemented without support for posting from mobile and no option to prevent public community posts from being included in your public stream. Both of those things have since been fixed, but I think it speaks to the same thing we're seeing here - Incomplete or outright lacking features that hurt obvious, compelling uses of the platform. Tom there is running a blog on G+ despite the lack of basic functions for formatting, linking and categorizing posts.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Someone had an idea of integrating Communities into Wordpress blogs, too, as sort of a forum replacement. I thought it was a pretty good idea, since they kind of act that way. You get "groups" of post, and then you can see everyone's post as a forum thread. I'd much rather implement something like that than BBPress.

Shooti 13y ago

Hate to invoke "Godwin's law: Reader edition", but it seems a bit bizarre that they didn't integrate a flavor of this G+ comment system into Reader before calling it quits as they seem symbiotic at first glance. EDIT: Thinking about it some more that would have the potential of turning Reader into a spammer/trolls paradise, so I guess the effectiveness of such a fusion is a bit more nuanced.

minimaxir 13y ago
Even though G+ doesn't allow anonymity, it doesn't mean that comments will be high quality.
acdha 13y ago
It was obvious that they wanted to kill Reader, as has been confirmed by many of the people who worked on it. The initial Google+ implementation was mediocre and no attempt was made to improve it – there were basic flaws like +1 sharing not working at all on mobile which went unfixed for at least a year.

atesti 13y ago

Does this new activity mean that Blogger will not be shut down in some "spring cleaning" in autumn?

sergiosgc 13y ago
It means Google will divert traffic from Blogger to G+ before spring cleaning Blogger.
- greyman 13y ago
  They can't do that, Blogger is too widespread already.

mindcrime 13y ago

Just turned this on for the Fogbeam blog, and so far, I like it. It's nice to pull together both the G+ related comments and the "native" blog comments in one place. And while I certainly have my issues[1] with Google and G+, I generally like G+ more than Facebook and if this helps encourage adoption of it, so much the better in that regard. Just c'mon, Google, give us access to our social graph using FOAF, ability to subscribe to Circles / Streams / Groups / whatever using RSS, ability to add an RSS feed to a Circle / Group / etc., and a Write API based on AtomPub. Throw in SIOC for the commenting stuff, and we're BFF's again. :0) [1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-will-defend-open.html http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-good-google-who-wil...