The post title says it all: it seems that Google is rethinking its stance against remote posting to Google+. A recent article on the main WordPress blog called Your Blog, Plus One: Connect and Share on Google+ announces that you can now share directly to Google+, link your blog to your G+ account, integrate comments and even embed G+ articles into WordPress posts. It’s the first one I’m very excited about, but at the moment all this still applies only to blog hosted on WordPress.com – however they promise that most of the features will also come to the Publicize module of the Jetpack plugin for self-hosted blogs. I just hope that most doesn’t mean that the sharing functionality will be left out!

The whole point of this is that I’ve become very fond of Google+ since I joined at the end of last year. At the beginning I was very reluctant to post because I couldn’t do it directly from WordPress, but over time I’ve found out that it works very well for me especially on the Photography Blog. The interaction between the users is what I like most – it’s not just about getting +1’s, the G+ equivalent of Likes, but really meeting other people, talking about what we like and what matters to us, and, of course, lots and lots of inspiration. Posting remotely from WordPress like I do on Facebook and Twitter will not change any of that – except that I may be able to plan better ahead when I’m actually able to post automatically. This is what Google doesn’t want to allow – but I don’t see anything wrong with e.g. letting the blog post an article and then later come back and see if there are any comments to answer. I’m certainly not going to abuse that, but it would make everything much easier.

I actually have one rule for myself: I will not post exclusively to Google+ or any other social network – everything that appears there will also be on one of my websites, with small exceptions like the occasional quick reshare and, of course, commenting. I may actually embed Google+ comments on my blogs in the future, because most people tend to comment on my postings over on G+ and hardly on the blogs itself – which I fully understand, because I’m also guilty of it myself. I would just like to link the WordPress postings to the comments on the corresponding Google+ article. But, in the light of what happened to CosmoQuest recently, I may decide against a direct comment integration – maybe just a backlink to the G+ article would be better if it can be done automatically.

But first let’s see what happens when the next Jetpack update comes – fingers crossed that this will really include posting from WordPress!

[Update 22.09.: There was a fairly large Jetpack update a couple of days ago with lots of Google+ connection stuff in there, but the Publicize module has not changed yet, so it’s still not possible to post from a self-hosted WordPress site to G+. They promised, however, that this is going to be implemented soon… but when is unclear.]