For years, other blogging platforms such as WordPress and Posterous, and even Tumblr, as a newcomer, have far surpassed Blogger in sophistication when it comes to publishing. Blogger has now decided to enter into the competition with a complete overhaul coming soon. Check out what they’ve got planned:
Take a look at the current Blogger dashboard:
Here’s a sneak peak of the new Blogger dashboard that will be coming soon:
It looks nothing like the current Blogger interface, right? Google, which bought Blogger in 2003, is getting serious about making Blogger a contender.
Features coming to Blogger in the near future:
The “Have you looked at Blogger lately?” video previews several new features that Google is going to be adding in 2011, including:
- The ability to easily customize templates without any CSS knowledge
- Access to real-time stats
- Improved spam filtering
- Continued stability (The Blogger service has had zero downtime, according to Pingdom)
- Inclusion of web fonts
- A sleek mobile experience of the platform
- Smart content discovery
- Integration of the Google Web Toolkit
That’s an impressive array of new features to add into the fully re-designed new interface. Things are about to get really interesting, especially if Blogger is able to offer more features for free that a wordpress.com user would normally have to pay for. Many people already find that setting up a quick blog on Blogger is much easier than WordPress.com for the average user.
Blogger is the sixth largest website in the world. With the Google super power behind the platform and 400 million active readers around the world, Blogger stands to gain quite a bit from its plans for a complete overhaul. So what do you think – will Blogger be able to stand up to the competition with WordPress and other major blogging platforms?
Sarah,
Another great post, thanks!
Personally, I don’t think they stand a chance because unlike WordPress none of these platforms offers a self-hosting option. There are some fundamental challenges with hosting your content on someone else’s infrastructure.
I’m not saying everyone needs to start self-hosted, but everyone should have the option of doing so – when having that option doesn’t cost you anything.
WordPress is the only solution that offers this growth path (to my knowledge).
David
I’ve always been impressed with Blogger, especially its ease of use. I don’t have any predictions, time will tell. I know they had a horrible time with spammer recently.
The only reason I chose WordPress, back then was the self hosted version, like David says, though I have seen some of my friend’s site’s using their domain but the backend being blogger.
Still they don’t have BuddyPress or something similar to make me want to change :)