Google Sneakily Deals Another Blow To Microsoft Users

I’ve been using Microsoft’s amazing blogging platform, Live Writer, for longer than I can remember. It was always my go to publisher for my Wordpress and Blogger blogs. In fact, almost every post I have made for this blog has been through Live Writer. Unfortunately, Microsoft discontinued the product after the 2012 version, though it continued to work for me well after that point. Last week however, I was struck with the error in the image above. I figured Blogger was down and I would save it and try again later… Boy was I wrong…

As it turns out, Google, the owner of the Blogger services, performed yet another API change to shut down third party “back door” access. This is the type of access which Live Writer and other 3rd party writing Apps used to send the posts to the service. While Google has done this before in the past, it’s all too apparent that this volley was once again aimed squarely at the Live Writer program as it appears to be the only program that I use that was affected by the change.

Call it a security update or a maintenance thing, but I will call it out for what it is, Google is blocking Microsoft’s access to their services one more time. It happened with YouTube and it is happening again with Blogger. It’s only a matter of time before Google really does something terrible and blocks Gmail or something crazy like that from Windows and then we will really see an uproar.

Until then, the open source project version of Live Writer was not affected by this patches that Google put in place this week, which strangely enough is virtually the same coding, but not with Microsoft’s branding. The Open Live Writer program is available at www.openlivewriter.org and is free of charge.