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Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

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Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations.

This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail.

The first iteration of the labs feature added a ‘Web Search’ box next to the main column (left side on the screenshot) that provides much of the same functionality, only you needed to remember to go to the side column to run a search. Now, enabling the feature also adds an icon to the top toolbar in the ‘Compose Mail’ window, where you can also customize colors and fonts for your message, add links and emoticons and more. continue reading…

It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter’s Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SUL to be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower.

Today, you can “buy” followers on eBay for less than a penny each. Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” Some even only count reciprocal followers (followers who follow back).

How do they do this? Well, there are automated bots, of course. But another method we’ve heard about anecdotally uses cheap labor in China to create Twitter Follower farms (similar to the gold farms that grew around online games like World of Warcraft). Online laborers in China essentially create thousands of Twitter accounts which can then follow other accounts. Yes, people are actually paying for this worthless service. The sellers on eBay may very well use different methods. But the fact that these types of followers are worthless shows in the plummeting rate for Twitter followers from a quarter each a year ago to less than a penny now.

So are Twitter followers simply worthless as many people have suspected all along? I think you have to distinguish between real followers and fake followers (maybe Twitter could start a Verified Follower service), and how engaged those followers are. Do they retweet a lot and engage in conversation, or never tune in at all? Follower counts don’t tell you that. Just as all Website visitors are not worth the same, neither are all Twitter followers. But you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.

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