Twitter co-founder Ev Williams on Blogger & blogging's future
When the rumors of Google retiring the Picasa and Blogger brands hit the web last week, it sent me down memory lane. It made me think about blogging in general and how it had evolved. I wanted to write an Om Says newsletter …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-flare-up in a debate the corpus has been running for years: the "blogging is dead" argument was already circulating in December 2007, and Ev Williams himself returned to the theme last December with his warnings about a web of infinite information (the challenges of infinite info). What re-triggers it now is the rumor, unconfirmed by Google, that the company plans to retire the Picasa and Blogger brands.
The timing matters because Google+ has just launched to excited early-adopter dissection on Twitter, and Google's enterprise chief Dave Girouard has already confirmed via Google+ that Apps users will get access. Williams — who built Blogger before co-founding Twitter — writing about blogging's future while its founding brand is rumored headed for absorption makes the commentary more than nostalgia.
First-order effects
- Blogger's user base faces brand uncertainty: if the reported retirement proves real, one of the web's oldest publishing identities gets folded into Google's broader account-and-social structure rather than standing alone.
Second-order effects
- The rumored Picasa/Blogger move fits a visible Google pattern this week — confirmed Apps-to-Google+ integration and a rumored Punchd acquisition pulling founders like Reed Morse and Niket Desai in-house — signaling to other standalone web services that Google's integration pull is accelerating.
Third-order effects
- If legacy blog platforms keep getting subsumed into social networks, blogging completes the shift flagged back in 2007: from a branded product category into a dispersed activity hosted inside centralized platforms, with figures like Williams positioned as the bridge between the two eras.
The trend: Independent publishing brands are being absorbed into unified social platforms, and the people who built the original blogging tools are becoming the commentators on their dissolution.