Google Adds Follower Feature to Blogger

If you use Blogger as your blogging application, you might be interested in a new social feature that Google rolled out to all English Blogger users last week called Follower.

With the Follower feature, Blogger users can "follow" blogs that they like. When a user signs up to follow a specific blog, the recent posts for that blog automatically appear in the user's Blogger dashboard. It's sort of like a mini RSS feed through the Blogger dashboard, but only other Blogger blogs can be followed using the feature. In fact, if you use Google Reader as your feed reader, the Blogger blogs you sign up to follow will appear in their own folder within Google Reader called "Blogs I'm Following."

Bloggers can also use tools in their own dashboards to see who is following their blogs and publish a gadget directly on their blogs showing how many people are following the blog (Blogger users only) and who they are.

Google plans to integrate another feature called Google Friend Connect into Blogger that will allow Blogger users to add more social elements to their blogs. You can read more on the Blogger Buzz blog.

What do you think of the new features Google is adding to Blogger?