Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Alas, Google+

Sort of a non-RPG post today.  But like a thief in the night, Google took away all of the Google+ Blogger integration.

If you are getting ready to post something today you will be greeted with this message:


The Learn more link takes you to their page explaining it in detail.

Gone are badges, the Google +1 buttons, and circle widgets.





Also gone, and this is a much bigger issue, are all the comments people made IF you moved over to the Google+ comment system.

I didn't here, but I did for my atheism blog, The Freedom of  Nonbelief.  So all of those comments are gone.  I know others did as well and had many, many more comments than I had there.

Of course, this is just the start of the end for Google+.  This along with the URL shortener Goo.gl are going away and it will have an impact on many of us in the Blogger community and the OSR community.

To the right I have a script that displays different books I have done.  The script is affectionately called "GoRando.js" but it uses the Goo.gl url shortener to work.  So I need to fix that right away.

We also have a ton on communities in Google+.
For me it means closing down my own Victorian Gamers Association: Role-playing in the Age of Victoria group and moving back over to the Facebook version.

I hope the communities on G+ do find new homes, but there will be an inventible splintering.   I have heard a lot of people saying they "won't do Facebook" and that is fine, but my communities and groups are there, so to pick up and try to build a new one elsewhere would take a lot of work.

If you are a fan of this site then I also suggest you check out my Facebook page for it. https://www.facebook.com/OtherSideblog/

I also created a MeWe group for this blog and my books.
https://mewe.com/group/5c598927dc9a663c488557e9

Where ever we all go, hope to stay in contact.

4 comments:

Ruprecht said...

Have they said anything to give folks confidence that Blogger isn't next?

Jason Zavoda said...

Yeah, got that message. It really sucked and Im worried about blogger so Im looking for a way to archive it.

JB said...


Welp, I guess we'll just have to go back to the "old days" of networking through "word o mouth" (i.e. linking to and referencing blogs we're reading in our posts)...at least until there's a simple way to post Blogger to MeWe.

Jeremy "frothsof" Smith said...

I enjoyed this post and featured it on my podcast this week.

https://frothsofdnd.blogspot.com/2019/02/humpday-blog-o-rama-2619.html