Skip to main content

A Community Account Is Required, For Following

The Blogger / Google community building accessory, Following, has become so popular that recently we are seeing requests about Following by people without Blogger / Google accounts.
How do I Follow a blog using my HotMail account?
As if any email account can be used, for Following.

Right now, you can Follow a Blogger blog, using any of 6 different account hosts - 5 outside Blogger / Google authentication space.
  • Google
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo
  • AIM
  • Netlog
  • OpenID

The profile displayed, with demographic details, lists of blogs, and such, will vary, depending upon what account host a given Follower is using.

Profiles besides Blogger and Google are supported.

We are most familiar with the Blogger and Google profiles. There are additional profile selections available, which does not equal the account host selections.

You can change your profile selection for each site from the "Site Settings" wizard.

Normal email accounts - like HotMail - don't provide any community infrastructure, and any profile at all. Can you even upload a picture, to HotMail, that would be served by their servers and appear on a Followed blog? Will HotMail serve a profile, to let people browsing any Followed blog see who you are, and what other blogs / websites you have Followed?

You simply need an account on any supported host.

You need an account on a host, that's recognised by Google, and serves a community experience, to Follow any Blogger blog, using Following or Friend Connect. Which account you use will affect both your ability to Block unwanted Followers, and your ability to read the contents of Followed blogs.

It's not difficult to setup a Blogger / Google account.

Fortunately, it's not difficult to setup a Blogger / Google account, based upon any existent (or non existent) non Google account. A Google account does not have to be based on a GMail email address - it can, just as easily, be based upon a HotMail email address - and can be setup in a couple minutes, from the Google "One account" login screen.


(Update 2016/01): Blogger Engineering is now rewriting Following, to make the Followers gadget and the Following service more reliable - and they are eliminating these non Google services from Following. Anybody using any of the non Google services is urged to Follow this blog again - using a Blogger / Google account.

Comments

Carley Cooper said…
OK... I just sent you a long comment... I'm not sure if it was on this post or another one. Like I said, I am sooo confused; but any how, I thank you for your time. I think I may have figured it out. I found some settings that I have never seen before. I changed a few things and it seems now everything appears to be working as I hoped. I really like the info you give on your blogs. It is very helpful. I still don't understand why Google & Blogger have to make things so complicated though. lol

Popular posts from this blog

Adding A Link To Your Blog Post

Occasionally, you see a very odd, cryptic complaint I just added a link in my blog, but the link vanished! No, it wasn't your imagination.

Embedded Comments And Main Page View

The option to display comments, embedded below the post, was made a blog option relatively recently. This was a long requested feature - and many bloggers added it to their blogs, as soon as the option was presented to us. Some blog owners like this feature so much, that they request it to be visible when the blog is opened, in main page view. I would like all comments, and the comment form, to be shown underneath the relevant post, automatically, for everyone to read without clicking on the number of comments link. And this is not how embedded comments work.

What's The URL Of My Blog?

We see the plea for help, periodically I need the URL of my blog, so I can give it to my friends. Help! Who's buried in Grant's Tomb, after all? No Chuck, be polite. OK, OK. The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status", and the title of this post is "What's The URL Of My Blog?".