Blogger Gets “The First of Many Google+ Features”
Blogger has announced “the first of many Google+ features” today, launching an automatic +snippet sharing box after you publish a blog post. It only saves a few clicks, but this makes it as easy as humanly possible to share Blogger posts to your Google+ circles.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has a long record of bolting social-sharing features onto its own publishing tools and then letting them languish: Google Shared Stuff launched in 2007 and was called out within weeks for getting no love in the company's broader social push, per criticism at the time. The Blogger revamp teased in March 2011 — new interface, mobile themes, content discovery — set the stage for tighter product integration.
The +snippet box that appears after publishing is the first concrete payoff of that roadmap, and Blogger itself frames it as 'the first of many' Google+ features — meaning the blog platform is being positioned as a feedstock for Google+'s circles.
First-order effects
- Blogger authors get one-click distribution of every new post into their Google+ circles, removing the copy-paste step that previously separated publishing from sharing.
- Google+ gains a steady stream of long-form content from Blogger's large installed base without those users ever leaving the blog dashboard.
Second-order effects
- Rival blogging platforms face pressure to offer equivalent Google+ hooks or risk their writers' posts being less visible inside Google's social layer.
- Automated +snippet shares inflate Google+ activity metrics, giving the network more to show against Facebook and Twitter when measuring engagement.
Third-order effects
- If the 'many more features' promise holds, distribution for Google's own publishing properties consolidates around the Google+ social graph — a textbook case of platform infrastructure dependency, where reach on your own blog increasingly runs through one company's sharing layer.
- The pattern echoes the Shared Stuff era: Google keeps re-attempting social integration through existing products rather than standalone ones, with each attempt raising the stakes for how deeply its properties are wired together.
The trend: Google is rewiring its legacy publishing tools so Google+ becomes the default distribution layer, turning product integrations — not standalone social apps — into its main social strategy.