Google+ now allows you to embed a public post into any* website. You'll notice in the example below you can interact with the post as you would natively on Google+, including expanding comments.
Here's an example from my Google+ profile:
Well isn't that just nifty?! Just click the drop down arrow on any public post and click the "Embed post" option.
This will work for ANY public post, not just your own. You may have noticed the asterix on "any" up top. Technically any site that allows javascript embeds will work, but some pages will require a bit more work. If you take a look at the screen capture below, you'll note must put in two scripts to enable the post. In Squarespace for instance you can embed them both into a blog post (yeay!), but I've heard there are issues with WordPress taking out any javascript from the post. You may have to follow the directions from Google VERY carefully.
A note from the Google Developer Blog:
In addition to posts that contain text and links,
the following additional types of posts are supported as embedded posts:
Posts with images - The post will render with the image. Clicking the image directs the visitor to the image view on Google+.
- Posts with videos - The post will render with the video. Clicking the video will play the video within the embedded post.
- Posts with links to a community - Your visitors can click through to view the community as they would in the stream.
The following post types are not supported:
- Posts from within a community, including publicly reshared posts from a community.
- Posts that are restricted to a Google Apps domain
- Private posts
- Events posts
- Hangout on Air posts
There is one more thing (you may have already noticed) that I would mention. There is (currently) no way to adjust the width of the embed. I presume Google is doing some javascript magic, but it may not play well with the SquareSpace magic* that allows our site to resize dynamically to your screen size.
All said, it's pretty neat to see all that Google is doing to innovate on the web. Between this and the (hopeful) end of troll-feeding on YouTube I still have hope that Google will continue to "make money without doing evil".
Want to hear us talk more about Geeky subjects like this? Come check out The Geek I/O Show (recording live on Thursday evenings at 9PM CST).
