While Google is being hailed for embracing openness regarding its wireless bid (not to mention its phone software), it looks as if that philosophy has infected Blogger (aka blog*spot).
The Blogger team has recently begun experimenting with OpenID, allowing users from AOL, LiveJournal, WordPress.com and Typepad to post comments using their own ID’s, or any registered OpenID that they may have.
(Blogger in Draft) Blogger in Draft now lets you enable OpenID-based commenting, in your blogs’ Settings | Comments tab: […]
This means that users of OpenID-enabled services — such as LiveJournal and WordPress — can comment on your blog using their accounts from those sites, rather than with Blogger/Google accounts[.]
As TechCrunch noted, hopefully Google’s entrance into the field will make OpenID popular for geeks and non-geeks alike, especially social networks (as there are too many to register for IMHO).
But Blogger is not the only update Google has made to its services. Google has also made it slightly easier to use Google Reader by adding not only a “drag and drop” feature, but recommending blogs/news sites for users to subscribe to as well.
(Google Reader Blog) To help with the discovery of interesting sites to subscribe to, we just released personalized recommendations in Reader. When you visit our discovery page, you’ll see quite a few feeds that we think you may find interesting. “Interesting” here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. […]
Recommendations make it even easier to subscribe to lots of feeds, so then the question becomes: how do you organize those feeds better? As luck would have it, one of the other features we’re announcing today is drag-and-drop support for your subscriptions and folders. You can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list.
While the drag and drop feature may be Google’s way of staying ahead of Bloglines (which implemented this within their beta a few months before), their recommendations may either having you thanking your Google overlords or screaming big brother.
Either way Google continues to push innovation within the blogosphere, and whether you love them or hate them, it seems that you can not simply ignore them–at least until Microsoft gets its game on.
