Google reveals three million communities of followers on Blogger blogs

27 Feb 2009

Since Google launched its Following feature during the autumn to help bloggers connect with fans of its blog and discover communities of people with the same interests, some three million communities are now linking with each other.

According to Google, there is one new person following a blog every second.

The company has announced it is integrating the Blogger Following feature with Google Friend Connect to give blogs expanded visibility across the web, as followers join other sites and share activities with friends.

“Blogger joins an open network of websites already using Friend Connect, and visitors can now follow any Blogger blog by signing in with their Google, Yahoo!, AOL, or OpenID credentials,” said Mendel Chuang, product marketing manager, Google Friend Connect.

“The blogs that readers start to follow will appear alongside the other Friend Connect sites they’ve already joined. Additionally, you can find some new blogs and websites to join by checking out the profiles of other followers.

“If you have a Blogger blog, and you’re already using the Followers gadget, you don’t need to do anything to get these new features up and running — we’ve already migrated all of the existing Followers gadgets to the new version with Friend Connect,” Chuang added.

By John Kennedy

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com