Blogger and Google Plus Officially Tied

That’s the news from the Googlesphere, that Blogger users will now be able to bring in Google Plus conversations into the comments of their blogs.

On one hand, this makes sense, and might be quite useful for Blogger users who are also active on Google+. I hope they enjoy being able to extend their blog conversations into Plus and vice versa.

On the other hand, this just goes to show how much of Google is a completely closed system. Sure, you can bring in comments from Google owned Plus into Google owned Blogger. But what if you want to bring in comments to Blogger from Facebook, Twitter, etc.? What if, as a WordPress user, you want to bring in comments from Plus?

Look, this is a nice feature for Blogger users, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is also part of Google’s larger strategy to be your one stop “everything” shop, and to share data about you and your actions online across all of their products. Think about it, what better way for Google to target advertising to you (And let’s not forget that at the very base level, Google is an advertising company), than to know what blogs you comment on, and what you have to say, who you’re connected to, what kinds of things are in your email messages, who those are from, what you search for online, what events are coming up on your calendar, and on and on and on? They are creating a profile of you, using the combination of your activities on all of their products, and they are keeping you behind their walled garden when you use those products. Your own site, your Twitter handle, your Facebook or LinkedIn profile? Those don’t belong to Google, and Google can’t take the identity you’ve created on Google’s products to track you in those environments. In a nutshell, allowing interoperability isn’t really in Google’s interest, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it.

While I think it’s cool that they are adding interoperability from Blogger and Plus, wake me when Google actually offers up a public API so the rest of the online world can interact with Plus. Until then, Plus remains just another site I have to login to in order to see what’s happening.

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