Do you know Jenna from SewHappyGeek? She sent me a message yesterday asking me what I was going to do when Google Friend Connect went away. My first reaction was, what?!? GFC is going away?!? Then I realized that it was only going away for non-blogspot bloggers, like Jenna and I. We both use wordpress. Jenna wrote a great post today about how she is handling it, and I decided that I better be proactive as well. Head over to Jenna’s blog to get all the details on this sadness.
As of March 2012, you will no longer be able to follow my blog via Google Friend Connect – this is sad, but business is business and I want you to be able to follow me. I am setting up a new account on BlogLovin’ and I hope you will follow me there. BlogLovin’ has a couple of really great features, like apps for both Droid and iPhones for you to easily read your feeds from your phone. I hope you will follow me over there, if not, there is Networked Blogs and my RSS feed in the side bar.
You can also follow my blog on Facebook now!
Following on Bloglovin’ and FB!! 🙂
Are you going to require we follow you that way or if we follow via email subscription are we ok? I know for many of the blogs for any giveaways it’s been required we be a GFC follower. (right this second I don’t recall if you have so I’m just asking now)
I’m not sure I like Bloglovin from a developer/owner’s perspective. I’ve been playing around with it some. What I don’t like about it, is that when one clicks a post from there, it opens up framed on the bloggers site. So, the URL to the post remains at bloglovin. Which to me that means you’ll never see the site traffic on your own site unless the user then clicks into the post or they close the bloglovin X at the bottom of the screen. It’s the same problem I have with Networked Blogs, they frame your content in their wrapper too. Site traffic is important to advertisers.
I’m removing GFC today, and will recommend to my readers to follow via RSS feed (I quite like Google Reader), or Feedblitz which sends an email each time there’s a new post or even my newsletter. Feedblitz has worked well for me over the years. I’ve never really liked GFC, but there are more than 500 using that on my site. Not impressed with Google’s decision. I don’t have time for Google+ right now. 🙁
I don’t like Google Friend Connect. For me, part of the reason I read blogs is because it’s so much more personal than Facebook or Twitter. I use the “next blog” button on Google Reader or I use Google Reader on my phone to read blogs. The only reason I’ve had to GFC somebody is to do giveaways, and then it’s just a hassle to find the button on their site, and get a popup when I click it.