Blogger Goes Friendly with “Follow” Feature

Recently, Google’s free Blogging platform, Blogger (aka Blogspot.com), introduced a new feature where blog owners can easily see who are reading their blogs as well as display which blogs they are reading. Although, there are third-party applications who can do this - Yahoo’s MyBloglog for instance, Blogger’s Following feature is easily activated through your Blogger’s Dashboard.

The Follower/Following feature is supposed to roll out in the coming weeks. So don’t fret if you can’t find it in your Blogger dashboard just yet. But once it gets activated in your acount you can immediately click on it and start seeing who are following your blogs.

Things get better when after activating the following feature, you can also add a Google-powered gadget which lets you display a list of followers via an embeddable widget. Yes, ala MyBloblog style. The widget also gives your readers a quick way to follow your blog if they find it interesting.

In addition, in the Blogger Dashboard, you’ll also see a tab which says “Blogs I’m following” which upon clicking on it will display feeds from all the blogs that you are following.

For Google Reader users, you’ll also see the same tab soon.

This new features of course are a last ditch attempt to put back the luster of Google’s blogging platform. As well as to infuse some social networking flavor into it.

The question now is - does Blogspot.com still have the membership base? Many of them we believe have shifted to a more robust Wordpress.com, right?