Today Google announced that readers of blogger (or blog*spot) blogs can now subscribe to comment discussions via email!
(Blogger Buzz) Last night we pushed a small-but-crazy-useful new feature for all Blogger blogs: subscribing to comments via email. This makes it a lot easier to stay in the conversational loop after you’ve commented on a post somewhere. […]
In order to receive follow-ups via email, you’ll need to post your comment using your Google Account. We only send comments to your verified Google Account so that someone else can’t use this feature to send you email you didn’t sign up for.
Previously in order to “keep up” with the conversation, users had to subscribe to a feed via RSS. Although this feature is great for finding updates regarding blog posts, news, etc., using it to keep up with the latest comments was probably less than ideal.
While this new feature will probably be welcomed by many blogger blogs users, Google should probably drop the “must have Google account” requirement, and instead embrace the openness of the web.