Google gifts its Blogger, a MakeOver

In the 50th year of internet, when more is less and less is intolerable, where everyone is in a hurry to reach somewhere, and multi-tasking comes naturally, Google is going all out to become the be-all and end-all of the webbed world. With mailing, chatting, documenting, scheduling and searching available on Google, it is now set to turn heads with the Blogger.

In its 8th year with Google, Blogger has been used for more than half a million blog posts and is read by over 400 million people and around 5000 novels worth of new words a day. Chang Kim, Product Manager - Google, says that it is among the top 10 sites according to Alexa and is called the most reliable blogging service by Royal Pingdom, which says, “the Blogger blogs didn’t have any downtime whatsoever during the two months we monitored them, followed by WordPress which had very little downtime.”

2011 is the year of the Blogger, at least according to Google. Old was gold. In 2011, the new will rule. Google, which had not changed the look of Blogger since 2003, is now singing a different tune. Kim writes on Google’s official blogpost, “We introduced template designer, real-time stats, comments spam filtering, mobile templates, web fonts, and more. 2011 promises to be another exciting year.” With stiff competition from blogging platforms like Wordpress; Google has decided to get its act together and revamp Blogger. Although the ‘next generation user interface’ built using Google’s Web Toolkit, which uses Ajax-enabled drag and drop features, looks a little like Wordpress.

Another major addition is the new content discovery feature. A list of interest related readings and posts will be given to a user depending upon what they are currently reading. The new Blogger will associate topical keywords and present the matches in a drop down menu. The new design was showcased at SXSW last week. This design is more sparkling and spotless than the one used till now and is completely up-to-date.

The teaser video flaunts the newest features of the improved and user-friendly Blogger. This step was necessary considering that about 75% of the traffic comes outside of the US and keeping the cultural dimension in mind is also essential. An easy setup and simple to use webpage would prove to be a great advantage to Google, and help it reach the top of the ladder.

With internet on the go, it is also crucial that Google looks at making Blogger friendlier for smartphones and tablets. As we all know, J.K. Rowling conceptualized Harry Potter and the miraculous world while traveling on the train. If Google gets smarter, who knows how many record breaking novels and stories might emerge from the Blogger. As of now, let’s just say - Cheers, to that thought.