We need Markdown Support on Google+

http://f.cl.ly/items/0D1I330m3B472p0R281K/nvALT-Preview-MultiMarkdown.png

Google+ is already excellent as a blog service mainly thanks to the incredible interaction it is there. I have never seen so much interaction, but it’s very simple, we can almost not format our blog posts at all.

We need MarkDown support. Yes I know that we have a simple strange version of some MarkDown. We can make Bold text by surrounding the text with asterisk (one asterisk instead of two strangely though), and we can make it Italic too by surrounding text with underscore _ (also kinda strange). We can also do Strike Through text by surrounding text with -.

So I wonder, why not use full real support of MarkDown1 instead? That way we can get rid of all ugly pasted URL’s directly in the post, and we could do nice looking lists, paragraphs and block quotes too. We could even add images directly in the posts!

MultiMarkdown, or MMD, is a tool to help turn minimally marked-up plain text into well formatted documents

MMD is a superset of the Markdown syntax, originally created by John Gruber.

(via MultiMarkdown)

markdown

And MarkDown is so easy to learn so anyone could start using it.

If Google could add full MarkDown support on Google+ it would become a really cool and modern blog service. All the users that complains that we need formatting on Google+ would be satisfied, and we could create really nice looking Google+ posts.
The quality of the content will be even higher than it is now. And MarkDown would easily work in mobile apps too because it’s just plain text. The parsing would be done by Google when we publish the posts. Exactly as their kinda strange implementation of bold, italic works today.

By the way, please follow me on Google+.

See more posts about MarkDown here.


  1. Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz allowing people “to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)”. Link to more info.




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