 |
| (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
In today's post, the team is hinting for the new design. In fact, the design doesn't differ much, the elements were introduced many weeks ago and continuously improved. Almost all the important features are now integrated. I ranted about the absence of the "Enclosure Links". But now it's back in the interface. So far so good. But the most important thing is still missing in most aspects: The Google+ integration.
Sure, you can share a post to Google+ after blogging with a requester opening. But not if you use the mobile client. Then this takes additional steps, which feels like 1998. Automatic sharing to Google+ must be coming. The problem is, that social networking, especially Google+ with its many features and awesome commenting crowd, is splitting blogging.
With every post I'm not sure where to open the topic. How can we solve this problem?
Posting on your blog, automatic share to Google+, and a full cross-commenting system where comments made on your blog appear in Google+ and vice-versa.
At least the comments-part was already confirmed from different Google employees as "coming soon". No real confirmations on the auto-share. I think this is an important step to let blogs being useful in the social hype.
Posting an important article to any social-network only, is not acceptable. You have no control over content, not nearly enough style options and layout features for postings, and the surrounding site is not yours. That makes not a good place to go for your customers or readers in the first line. having no own website or blog is like being homeless in the digital age. On the other side, benefits of social networks can be huge in terms of discovery, comments (actually people do participate there...weird) and sharing. We need to combine these two worlds.
I found myself posting more and more short status updates, instead of doing a regular post after some hours about a topic. And I found to blog much less than before. The content is gone forever, sucked into the big choke of social coughs. In a sea of words floating without getting to the surface ever again.
For the status updates I made a microblog, so I can still keep my content. But comments are made on Google+. Not at the blog site. And still, blogging rate has dropped dramatically here. We need to combine the best of both worlds by crossing the streams. Even if we shouldn't do it, it will safe our content :)
