Wednesday 27 January 2016

Well that's rubbish!

Hoi,

Yesterday and today i noticed a decrease in my "follower-count". It is entirely possible people get fed up with my ramblings and decide to leave the blog, but a bit of googlin' resulted in this post:

In 2011, we announced the retirement of Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites. We made an exception for Blogger to give readers an easy way to follow blogs using a variety of accounts. Yet over time, we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account. So, in an effort to streamline, in the next few weeks we’ll be making some changes that will eventually require readers to have a Google Account to sign into Friend Connect and follow blogs.
As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count.
We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.
We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.
Well that's rubbish!
Cheers Sander

9 comments:

Paul´s Bods said...

My followers dropped as well..I did wonder but now, thanks to your post, I know why :-D

The Angry Lurker said...

Lost about 70 in the last few weeks!

Sander said...

@Paul: yeah and here I was thinking it was due to my misbehaviour ;-)

@Fran: ow man that's harsh!

Mallius Vane said...

I lost a few, too!

Nick Grant said...

All hail our beneficent Google overlords!

Michael Awdry said...

I found the same this morning, all very sad.

Paulalba said...

Ahh, that explains the drop in followers. Picked back up after a few days though so I guess Google is pulling everybody in.

Ray Rousell said...

I've lost around 40 odd, over the last couple of weeks!!!

Sander said...

Well I cannot for the life of me understand how Google imagines this is an improvement in any thinkable way...