Google+ as your blog (using G+ API)

I think it's a bad idea hosting your blog on Google+.

It kind of depends on what type of blog you have of course - if you're hosting a blog of opinions that are a little longer that what you'd write on Twitter, then sure, Google+ is all you need.

Otherwise you need control.

Did you know for instance that Wordpress.com does not allow advertising of any kind without profit sharing with them? And many of us don't expect any profits from our blog, but it is sure nice to throw an Amazon link to a book that you'd really like to recommend anyway, and get a month worth of hosting back.

And sure, Google+ is not Wordpress.com, but IMHO they are worse as their primary business is not hosting blogs. Even if the product is new it already has a history of blocked accounts (WTF is that all about?). If Google blocks you, your identity is gone.

This is not how the web should work. You can host your blog in GitHub pages, static content is all you ever need. You're a developer, so you don't need a stupid WYSIWYG interface that never works as you expect it to. You can write Markdown or Textile or plain HTML and keep it in a Git repository.

For comments you can just use Facebook or Disqus, or implement your own quick and dirty solution in PHP or something cheap for starters, like GAE or Heroku. Well, Heroku is not cheap, but you can host 250MB worth of comments in CouchDB for free by installing an add-on.

Personally I have my own $20 Linode. I host there 2 blogs and a personal app I'm working on. Nginx is a very light process, it's easy to setup and can withstand an HN-effect on only a small instance. It's also good enough for a Wordpress install if I wanted that, but I just don't bother with Wordpress.

Don't host your blog content on third-party providers. Get your own domain, host static content for free or pay for a small instance - make sure you can rebuild that blog if banned from the service provider - and only submit the links to Google+ or Facebook or whatever, otherwise you'll later regret it.

G+, as Wave did, supports more vectors of communication than other tools, and this may be an achilles heel. Regular social media consumers, as much as we bitch about Facebook and Twitter and co, in truth find it convenient to be constrained to certain patterns; simply because the mental and temporal expense of making a communication pattern decision (along with the associated weighing of privacy risks etc) is greater than the perceived (low) value of each microblog entry / sharable communication.

Perhaps I'm just saying "not enough people care enough".

@antimatter15 did preliminary work to do exactly this with wave and wordpress, comments and all. it never took off. i actually used some of @antimatter15's work to use wave as a draft management system, and i can publish from wave to my blog in one click.

This has value to me for various reasons, namely I blog a lot more since the wave client is awesome for draft management. I'll probably move to wordpress soon because i don't want to maintain my own blogging software.

I'm exploring possibilities for incorporating plus into my online identity. But, it's not going to host a programming blog until I can embed snippets. I hear rich text or HTML is coming soon. Google obviously sees the potential, and is good at learning from experience, I don't think they will screw it up this time.

I like thus idea, especially if comments can be pulled across to the Web site version of the blog. I think it's become clear to me that "something" is going to happen to the traditional blog, a pro version of a G+ profile just might be it.

Will have to chew on this, thanks for the nudge.

I think Google+ is supposed to be a medium for sharing content, not for creating content. And while we've seen some blog-like posts there, sharing a link to your blog/tumblr/.. looks like a better option. Why? Because When you post it on google+, you don't have the many extras you can get in a dedicated blog. Especially the sharing buttons "tweet", "like", "digg", "stumble", etc. You only get a +1. In short - it takes a lot of control and a lot of options, and gives you nothing back.

I would happily use G+ as my blog for programming related things, but I would need to be able to make posts public and not spam my non-technical circles. Is that possible?

I hope G+ will evolve into a nice blogging tool by itself. The amount of G+ posts linked to from HN and other aggregators indicate the potential is there. I wish it were able to format code nicely and posts' urls included a title instead of a meaningless id (for SEO as well as humans).

I'm glad this has created a bit of discussion surrounding the possibility of using G+ as a primary blogging platform. I put together minimali.se over a couple of nights just as a concept, but many people seem quite drawn to the idea.

Personally I don't believe by itself Google+ offers enough to totally forfeit your current blog, but what it does do it does well. An implementation like this allows you to have the best of both worlds. I'm hoping in time the API will allow writes (in the form of comments at least) to make it possible to comment from external sources (like a blog), yet keep the actual engagement in one place.

I tried to do the same. When G+ made the first ever public release of the G+ API, My first thought was to create a nice blog out of the G+ public posts.

But, it didn't go well as I felt it wouldn't be better to compromise with the limitations.

This looks rather cool, and I’d be willing to outsource the guts of my bog to Google+, leaving me with just the UI. But it looks to me like there’s still no way to post to Google+ via the API, which makes this a non-starter for me.

Sounds like G+ is settling for competing with tumblr instead of facebook.

On a semi-unrelated note, that blog design is beautiful!