Watch out, WordPress and Tumblr. Blogger is about to undergo a major makeover this year.
At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas, search engine giant Google provided a glimpse of the new and improved Blogger, its very own blogging and publishing platform and sixth largest website in the world (according to Alexa). To be included in the series of updates to Blogger are: a brand new interface, a revamped post editor, a more customizable template designer, and a new content discovery feature. These and more are going to be rolled out throughout the year.
“2010 was a big year for Blogger,” wrote Chang Kim, Blogger Product Manager, in a blog post covering the announcement. “We introduced template designer, real-time stats, comment spam filtering, mobile templates, web fonts and more. 2011 promises to be another exciting year. We’re kicking things off at SXSW by giving folks a sneak peek at our next-generation user interface. The new design is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the latest in web technology.”
Apart from the integration of Google Web Toolkit – a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications – the new Blogger will also feature:
- The ability to easily customize templates without any CSS knowledge
- Access to real-time stats
- Improved spam filtering
- Continued stability, with zero downtime
- Inclusion of Web fonts
- A sleeker mobile experience of the Blogger platform
- Smart content discovery (which lets users find interesting and relevant related content based on the topics of blogs they are currently reading)
The announcement came with a retrospective (video) look at the 2010 highlights of the blogging platform, which saw users publish more than half a billion posts, write half a trillion words, and generate over 400 million views.