OK ... I'm not sure what it all means, but it probably means I'm being sliced and diced according to Google, which, like, "Big Brother" is bound to know better than I do and will screw me as a means of underlining its point.
Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019.
Google+ widgets: Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets in Layout will no longer be available. All instances of these widgets will be removed from your blog.
+1 buttons: The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed.
Please note that if you have a custom template that includes Google+ features, you may need to update your template. Please contact your template supplier for advice.
Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog.
Learn more.
FYI
ReplyDeleteGoogle has been offering a service called Google+.
https://plus.google.com/
Corporate Google (Alphabet?) deemed this service unsuccessful and decided to shut it down.
Not unreasonable, I think.
Your Notification as a BlogSpot Blogger was in case you availed yourself of the Google+ features. Had you done so now is the time to remove those links and figure out if the content needs to be relocated elsewhere online and how to do so.
I take issue with the title of this post. We aren’t directly paying out of pocket for the many services Google offers. Google gets its money from Ads and through its data collection, analysis and sales of the results, so-called analytics.
If Google+ provided no value for a significant number of customers and the company which providing that service, why should anyone feel they are being “shafted”?
Feel free to redirect your anger elsewhere. For example, the Trump administration’s policy on, well, anything you can think of.