Somehow, because I am not a computer geek, I seem to be late to the
party. You see, Google has been shutting down a lot of their previous
services. One of which is Google Friend connect. Okay, so I started
noticing that some of my followers were going away. Why is that, I
wondered? Then I saw a post on another blog stating the same thing.
Well, what do you know? It's really happening. Here is what was posted
on Google.
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.
So the story goes, if you do not have a Google account, you won't be
able to
follow me. I think!
You can follow me by email, or bloglovin, but there will
no longer
be GFC for non Google accounts. Sad, so sad. Why do they have
to
change things when everything is going so well?
I really don't want to lose any of my followers, and I hope that you
will get this message before everybody goes away.
Does everybody know about this already?