Blogger’s fresh new look

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.

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

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.