GFC Changes & Maintaining Your Subscriptions

I'm sure that many of you know this by now, but Google is discontinuing the Google Friend Connect service for non-Google websites by March 2012. This change will affect everyone. Nobody wants to be following Blogger blogs with GFC and Wordpress blogs with something else. There is also no guarantee of Google keeping this feature around for anyone for much longer. The best thing for everyone who uses GFC to do is to find new means of keeping followers and also to keep following the blogs that we read.

I suggest that, if you use GFC to follow blogs, you be sure to switch all of your subscriptions over to an alternative method of following/subscribing in order to guarantee that you do not lose any of those subscriptions or miss out on any posts. And if you are a blogger, then you will want to have some easy, alternative ways available for readers to subscribe to your blog.

At Mimosa Stimulus, you may subscribe to blog posts in the following ways:

• Subscribe to RSS feed in a reader (such as Google Reader) - This is probably the best way to keep up with all of your favorite blogs as well as news feeds. You can organize the feeds into folders (Books, Cooking, News, Favorites, etc.) and keep everything in one place for easy reading.
  *Note - If you use Google Reader and want to prevent duplicate items from showing up in your feed from GFC, then click on the cog wheel settings icon in the upper right, then go to "Reader settings" and then uncheck the box that says "show followed blogs from Blogger." This will allow you to follow blogs via RSS and GFC (while it lasts) without the annoyance and potential confusion of duplicates.
• Subscribe to receive posts via email - Subscribing via email means that you will receive posts in your email inbox. I have my emails set to go out each evening, if and only if new posts are made that day. I find that this is an awesome way to keep up with your favorite blogs.
• Like the Mimosa Stimulus page on Facebook - I just made a Facebook page for the blog about 5 minutes ago, so I could use some love in the likes department. Liking the page will give you the ability to see post updates in your Facebook news feed. I have set up a Networked Blogs account so that posts will automatically be sent to the Mimosa Stimulus Facebook page.
• Add Mimosa Stimulus on Google+ - I also just made a Google+ page for the blog. I'm not really sure yet how this one is going to work or if there's a way to automatically feed post updates to Google+ but I'll keep messing around with it to see how useful it is.

Some other places to follow me:

• Twitter - for links to new posts as well as my random ramblings
• Goodreads - I don't update my reviews on here as much as I should, but I keep my ratings up to date and you can also see what I'm reading or wanting to read. I'm also pretty active in some book clubs and groups over there. I won't ever spam you with invitations to groups or events or any of that stuff. So you can either friend me (and tell me that you follow my blog) or just follow my reviews.
• LibraryThing - Same as with Goodreads, basically. Though I use this one more for archival purposes and less socially.

Links to all of these things can be found in the sidebar (with the exception of Google+ because I'm still messing around with that one and will add a button for it once it gets more features and API support). If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the upcoming changes to Google Friend Connect or about alternative subscription methods, then leave them in the comments or feel free to email me.