When it comes to Google I find myself eating my words from a year ago -- they've really gotten their act together in terms of cleaning up their product line. I only hope they go to the next level and modernize the feature sets Blogger to catch up with the Tumblrs of the world. I'm also encouraged by the fact that they're shutting down side projects -- it's like when Jobs came back to Apple and cleaned up the product line by killing off fanboy favorites like the Newton and HyperCard (two products I loved).

I'm actually kinda surprised they did such a big revamp of Blogger, when I thought in some ways they wanted to position Google+ as sort of a replacement - being able to create public posts that are as long as you want, follow people without them following you back, etc. I wonder if there will end up being some cross-over between the two applications.

I'd bet you that it's coming -- my gut tells me they've focused the big guns on G+ and then will swing back to feature up other products to get a halo effect.

+1 (no pun intended) those services clearly have a large overlap. And there's also google pages. On a related note, wordpress.com/.org, thumblr did manage to held quite firmly. This also sounds like, not letting blogger degrade into an obsolete bulk, which clearly was (is?) happening.

Yet another project rewritten in GWT. Interesting, how they decide what UI technology to use in new products - GWT or Closure?

Is it really done using GWT? Of the web engineer friends I know at Google, most hate GWT and try to avoid using it whenever possible. Most Google products don't use it.

Do you know why they dislike GWT?

I know a lot of people who hate GWT, and it mostly boils down to GWT "abstracting away" the web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) such that you build web applications with no regard for the web as a medium. You can't really build software for a platform without knowing and understanding the constraints of that platform, and GWT tries to hide this as much as possible which leads to a lot of funky issues like huge memory footprints inside the browser, undocumented hiccups between Java and the JavaScript it generates for you, and a general lack of control over the user experience once it's within the browser.

The new Blogger uses Closure, not GWT.

What makes you think it's GWT? The blogpost doesn't mention it.

Switch to the new UI, open source code and search for __gwt_historyFrame, com_google_blogger_b2_gwt_dashboard_DashboardGwt etc.

Actually markup/generated script is pretty common for ones who worked with GWT, so it's very easy to distinguish such sites.

I'm gratified by this news, but there are a lot of dead blogs (5+ years with no posts or more) and some squatting going on. I'd love to be able to petition Google for one of these, but apparently the policy is that whoever registers it has it for perpetuity.

One of my favorite time-wasters is to think of a word or phrase, tack on ".blogspot.com" and see what's there. I rarely find active blogs this way.

Just now I tried http://chainsaw.blogspot.com/ and found a quintessential blogger blog with a single decade-old entry. I'd love to read a followup post but I know it will never happen.

Very occasionally I'll run into something like http://grasses.blogspot.com/ - abandoned, and perfect that way.

There can be a kind of weird beauty in those forgotten blogs.

I wonder if GOOG will allow users to petition for these namespaces. Unless they do, it's doubtful that I'd ever use Blogger.