What YOU Need to Know About New Blogger and Google+ Settings and Your Privacy

Like many of my fellow Bloggers, I received an email yesterday from Blogger (Google- the owner of Blogger). As far as I know this is the first email I have received from them in 9 years!

Here's the email-

Writing a thoughtful post and seeing how people engage can be really rewarding, so we’ve made it easier to reach a broader audience and see more of their reactions.

Once you enable Google+ Comments, people can share the comments they make on your blog to their circles in Google+, helping you reach people that they know. And there's more: mentions of your posts on Google+ automatically show up right in your blog's comments, so you can see more of people’s public conversations about your content (and private conversations you’re part of).

I want to make sure my readers and friends know about this change.  I have enabled the Google+ Comments, although I do realize I have a choice. I don't want anyone to feel their privacy was violated (although it certainly does have that feel to it). I've always been somewhat of an early adopter, and because I work in social media, I like to be able to test and experiment with these things personally before I attempt them professionally.

Like many of you, I find Google+ somewhat annoying and invasive. Just a few weeks ago I clicked on something innocuous, trying to look at something on Google+, (I was testing out a feature before I used it professionally), and it forced me to "add my friends back." One would assume this meant that my friends had added me first, and I should respond in kind. Instead, it suddenly added 200-300 people from my address book (hundreds of professional contacts I did not want to connect with)! And now, hardly a day goes by without getting 2-3 emails saying "this person I've never heard of before has added you back on Google+."

I'm not a fan of this site. I don't like how they keep making changes to one Google product, link it to another product, and then make it all tie in with Google+, forcing people to use it. For instance, this new comments feature.

However, in my experience, early adopting, and figuring out how it all works together, tends to work to my advantage (and others' advantage too, as I often seem to be giving friendly tutorials and advice!). 

So forgive me for enabling the comments. Feel free to leave a comment here to test how it will work. I'm not sure (yet) if you have to be my friend, or in my circles, to make it work.  (You can join me on the site here.)

One more thing to know-
If you engage with a post on Google+ (for instance here is one of mine- https://plus.google.com/118118311920343529956/posts/2Um7jXDJWZv ) and you leave a "plus one" or a comment, your response will partially show up on the blog post, even if you don't go to the blog post itself.  Feel free to check it and try it. First go to my actual blog post - http://beta.fool.com/erinannie/2013/04/15/can-companies-be-a-great-place-to-work-and-a-great/30726/ and look at the social media bar on the left. You'll see the Google Plus icon with a number in it. Now, go back to the Google Plus link in this paragraph above. "Plus one" it, or leave a comment. Go back to the blog post, reload the page, and you'll see that number has changed. As far as I can tell, there is no way for the blogger to track those number backwards. Except of course it is trackable by going to Google Plus and looking for it.


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