Google Close to Replacing Blogger Profiles with Google+ Ones

When Google says that Google+ is Google and the other way around, it means it. There are plans to integrate everything under the Google umbrella with the social site. Some products are more obvious than others, Blogger is in the first camp.

As Google's first, best known and still biggest social web product, Blogger is ripe for an upgrade. The site hadn't been getting much attention until earlier this year, but Google has been making an effort to get things moving again.

The Dashboard has been completely redesigned twice this year, since the first new design, which never saw the light of day, came before Google, or rather Larry Page, decided that it's time for a company wide redesign.

It's also getting several new, modern templates, dubbed Dynamic Views and built with HTML5, CSS3 and, of course, JavaScript.

But that's half of the upgrade, it's the part that people see, the other half is underneath.

Google+ will be built into Blogger

It's obvious that Google+ will be built into Blogger and the first move will be to replace Blogger profile pages with Google+ profiles. The Blogger profile pages haven't been included in the redesign and there's an obvious reason for that, they don't have long to live.

In fact, Google seems to be very close to swiping Blogger profiles with Google+ ones, users now get a notification encouraging them to link up their Google+ account, as Google Operating System noticed.

The feature doesn't work yet, the links in the notification point to non-existent pages, but Google wouldn't be displaying it if it weren't close to making the switch.

While there is no question that Google+ profiles will replace Blogger ones, there's no way of knowing how exactly Google plans to do that.

Most likely, Google will allow users to continue to use their Blogger profiles for a while, though it will be pestering them with notifications urging them to upgrade.

It should be interesting to see whether Google decides to upgrade Blogger profiles automatically and whether it will do so for those that haven't signed up for Google+ yet.

Automatically creating Google+ profiles for anyone with a Blogger profile is going to get a lot of people upset, so Google probably won't do it, but there are hundreds of millions of Blogger blogs, the potential to raise Google+ user numbers is great.