Google Friend Connect Accessory To Be Provided By Blogger

This week, Google announced the end to its website based community building accessory, Google Friend Connect, for non Blogger based websites.

We're retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012.

The announcement notes its replacement with Google+.

We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.

Blogger blog owners can continue to use the Followers gadget, can use Google+, or can build their communities using both features.

Blogger blog owners were recently offered several suggestions, to integrate Google+ into their blogs.

• The Google+ badge, placed on the blog, directs your readers to your Google+ profile.
• You can replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile.
• Replacement of your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile enables you to publish your blog updates to your Google+ followers.

With Google retiring Friend Connect, this allows Blogger to take over its functionality. Blogger blog owners, who like the idea of letting their Followers display their icons on the faces of our blogs, and view our blog updates in the Blogger Reading List / Google Reader displays, can continue to use the Followers accessory.

By removing Google Friend Connect from the Followers accessory, Blogger is hoping that the code supporting the Followers gadget can be simplified, and will become more stable. This will hopefully resolve many of the recently reported outages, both in the blog face display, and in our dashboard and Reading Lists.

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