Blogger connects to Google Friend Connect

When we introduced the Following feature for Blogger last fall, we wanted to help you connect with fans of your own blog and discover communities of people who share your interests. It has been exciting to see Following grow over the past few months, to say the least. With nearly three million communities of followers on Blogger blogs, and with one person following a blog every second, we've been looking for ways to help these communities continue to thrive.

As a first step toward that goal, today we are integrating the Blogger Following feature with Google Friend Connect. Not only does this make it easier for anyone to follow a Blogger blog, but also it gives your blog expanded visibility across the web as your followers join other sites and share their activities with their 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. 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.

This video shows you how to follow a blog:



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. To learn more, visit our blog post on Blogger Buzz.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect