I was hesitant to jump on the Google Plus band wagon when it was launched. I must have gotten one hundred invitations to join Google Plus and deleted every last one of them, until yesterday… I finally joined. Google announced on it’s blog on November 22nd of some more changes that are about to take place, some will take place immediately and others in the new year. The one that really jumped out at me and will effect my blog is that Google Friend Connect will be going away for ALL non blogger hosted blogs.
Read an excerpt taken from the official Google Blog:
“Google Friend Connect—Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We’re retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. 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.”
With that being said I had no choice but to join Google Plus and now I’ll try my best before March to convert all my Google Friend Connect Friends over to Google Plus or they have the option of subscribing to my RSS feed to keep up with all my content. My RSS feed button is located at the top right hand side of my blog where it say’s “Connect with me” and under my Klout badge I have my Google Plus badge where you can add me to your circle(s) and +1 my blog. I’ll return the love of course, after all that’s how we share and promote content to go viral.
I also just want to note that I didn’t think anything was wrong with Google Plus, I just have many social networks that I am a part of and I didn’t want to join anything that I wasn’t going to use actively and let sit dormant for long periods of time. The point of social networking pages is to use them, engage and be SOCIAL! So, the moral of this story is… If you are using GFC (Google Friend Connect) and you are NOT being hosted on blogger, you may want to jump on Google Plus before March 1, 2012.