Google+ Comments on Blogger

» see blogger.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 18 April 2013 the Blogger team posted "Bringing Google+ Comments to Blogger". It was a checkbox in your dashboard. Turn it on and your blog's comment section became a Google+ comment section, which meant two things were supposed to happen at once: the conversations people were already having about your post over on Google+ would appear underneath the post itself, and your existing comments would be carried over unharmed.

The price was in the fine print and was obvious to anyone who had run a blog for a while. Once you switched, a reader needed a Google+ account to say anything. The old Blogger comment box had accepted OpenID and anonymous strangers along with everything else; the new one accepted Google. This was the same trade Google was making everywhere that year, and a fair number of bloggers took it, because the alternative was a comment section full of spam and the Google+ one came with a name attached to every reply.

It was never made mandatory, and that detail decided how the ending went. The feature stayed a minority of Blogger for its whole life, which is the easiest kind of thing to remove.

~ the record ~

~ five days ~

On 30 January 2019, as part of winding down Google+, Google posted "An update on Google+ and Blogger". It said Google+ comments would be removed from Blogger blogs on 4 February and that blogs would revert to the ordinary commenting system. That is five days of notice for a thing that had been collecting reader writing for nearly six years.

The removal started on 4 February and rolled out over the following weeks. What reverting actually meant was that the old comment system came back with the comments it had when you left it in 2013, and everything written into the Google+ widget since then was no longer on the page. The blog did not lose a feature. It lost a conversation.

~ the month in between ~

There was a gap, and the gap is the only reason any of this survives. The comments had been implemented as an embedded widget, so the underlying data was still sitting behind a plain URL after it stopped rendering on anyone's blog. That URL kept answering until the Google+ API itself was shut down on 7 March 2019, somewhere between roughly 18:27 and 20:27 UTC.

Four people saw the window. Working under the handles tech234a, afrmtbl, jopik and glmdgrielson out of a Discord server called the Internet Trash Heap, they built a coordination server and a worker client and ran it from 26 February to 7 March. Candidate blogs came out of Common Crawl's index and the Wayback Machine's. They scanned slightly under thirty million blog domains and pulled the comment data for the roughly 181,565 that still had any. The result went up on the Internet Archive as JSON, with a searchable index beside it.

In November 2023 the leftovers of that project were handed on: a list of 34,285,898 blogs and a mapping of 64,921 custom domains back to their blogspot subdomains, given to Archive Team's general Blogger effort. Four years after the crawl, the index it had built was still the best one anybody had.

~ what this one is really about ~

I had a Blogger account in the university years and I never used Google+ comments on it, which puts me on the lucky side of a coin toss rather than on the smart side. By 2013 my writing had moved and Google+ was something I checked because YouTube made me, not because anyone I knew was there.

What stays interesting about it is where a comment thread lives. Readers writing under your post feel like they are writing on your site, and for six years on these blogs they were writing into a rented box bolted to the front of it. When the landlord took the box back the writing went with it. The people who lost the most here were the readers, and the decision that cost them was made by the blogger ticking a checkbox in 2013.

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