In an astounding, disruptive, indefensible and perplexing move, Google sent out a termination of service email today to all current users of Google’s Blogger FTP facilities. We use that service to publish Van’s Hardware Journal to our Tera-Byte server located in Canada.
The Google service will end March 26, 2010, giving bloggers less than two months to migrate to another blogging service or to follow Google’s solution which is to upload all external Blogger databases to Google’s servers and then point associated blog URLs to Google.
In other words, if you have been using Google’s Blogger FTP service, which has been around for several years and is used by many now very irate people, Google is holding a gun to your head in order to take control of your content.
Here is a comment I posted earlier on the Google Blogger site:
I do not understand why Google is terminating existing FTP blogging services. Why not simply remove the FTP/SFTP option from new blogs while maintaining current support for existing FTP blogs?
At the very least, why doesn’t Google release an open source blogging tool (either web-based or standalone) that allows current FTP bloggers to continue to maintain their sites?
Giving less than two months formal warning to current Google bloggers that their publishing service will be cut off unless they migrate their blogs to Google’s servers is a lot like placing a gun to our heads. This is one of the more “evil” things Google has ever done.
There is no valid technical reason for Google to suddenly pull the plug on all external, existing Blogger websites. This is an outrageous act of Internet piracy in what appears to be a play to take control of hundreds if not thousands of valuable blog sites.