NOTE: This feature is currently unavailable while we move some things around.
Are you curious to see how your friends are using WordPress? Give the new and improved Friend Finder a try to connect with your Twitter, Facebook, and Google contacts who have WordPress sites!
After authorizing WordPress.com to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account to find your friends (don’t worry — none of this account information is saved!) you’ll see a list of people you know who have WordPress sites.
Click Follow and each time your friend publishes a new post it will show up in your Reader under Blogs I Follow.
If you have multiple blogs, make sure to set the Primary Blog in your Settings so the correct blog is shown to friends when they find you.
If you’re interested in finding more cool blogs to follow, browse our collection of Recommended Blogs and try adding some topics to follow in your reader using the box in the bottom left.
WordPress.com News 
This is such a great idea. I recently realized that a friend I’ve known for YEARS also has a blog. And like mine, her blog also was inspired by a blindsiding, crazy-making divorce.
Now we’re both trying to find humor among some of the darkness and share our stories with others.
It’s amazing how the degrees of separation can be so much fewer than you even imagine…and this tool will help reveal those similarities much more efficiently than just stumbling upon them!
Thanks, I already knew this was available. Obviously none of my friends are using WordPress for their blogs because it says no one is available! We need to change that! I need to get comments on my website somehow!
We made a lot of improvements to how it works. It rarely found any friends before. 😦
Well, I’m glad you did, because it sure found them now, over 40 of them. (happy me 🙂 )
It’s working now! I found some of my friends! Thanks WordPress! You’re the BEST!
It’s such a hard thing to ask each one of your friends if they have a WordPress blog, but now (as always), WordPress saved our lives. 😀
I had to laugh when I saw in the example “54 of your friends are blogging with WordPress.” Fifty-four? Not only do I have zero friends blogging with WordPress, I have zero friends, period. If you read my blog, you’ll see why.
If I understand correctly, this feature will be outing people who prefer to have anonymous blogs. If my blog is called ‘Green Cushion’ & my real name does not feature anywhere, is WordPress now going to allow all my friends/contacts the ability to find my blog ‘Green Cushion’ & know it is mine? My friends already know I have a blog & how to get to it. I think there would be many people who would like to have a blog that is free for them to express themselves without worrying that their friends & FAMILY will be directed to it with the knowledge of whose blog it is. This feature should be an opt-in option. I would appreciate a reply. Thanks. 🙂
If you want a blog hidden you can set it to private in the Privacy Settings or set a different blog as Primary.
So I noticed you can find friends through Google. Sweet. Can you publicize to Google+ the way we can with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al.?
Not yet…
But if I don’t authorize WordPress + Facebook, my Facebook friends won’t see my blog, right?
If you’ve used Facebook on WordPress.com your friends could find your blog. You can always set it to private in the Privacy Settings if you don’t want anyone to find it.
Would be helpful if Linkedin could also be used to search for friends.
Thanks for that pickup Jacqueline! To guard against people finding my blog through my name (but not making it completely private) I’ve assigned a different blog as my ‘Primary’ one.
I have no idea how this is supposed to work. I clicked on all the prompts & it just brought me back here. No where did I see a place to enter a friend’s name.
Do you have popups blocked? You should get a popup window asking you to authorize the connection with each service.
Reblogged this on Peter's On WordPress.
Thanks. It is really good.
Good addition to WordPress. I was surprised to find that my closest friend had taken my advice to blog with WordPress. I suggested he blog in 2009! He seems to have followed my advice to open an account and forgotten to follow up. This feature has enabled me to remind him to start writing.
I used this feature before this announcement came out. It was a great help. 😛
I don’t like the sounds of the permissions i have to accept/authorize. Creepy.
So cool. Thanks a lot.
Any way of seeing what websites followers have (as opposed to having to follow them first)?
I have been carefully extricating myself from Facebook (done now) and Google (having trouble getting my stuff extricated–seems like they own the world), and never wanted to be on Twitter, but have a nominal account for just one purpose. I’ll quit that too, if I feel as if people are snooping on my friends list. I certainly will NOT give you permission to see my list! Read my publicletter.wordpress.com and see what my opinions are on Google’s rampant inroads into people’s data bases!
What a fantastic and helpful feature.
Thanks for this great idea, I just found lots of friends on twitter:)
Thanks a million for this …. have to start searching now.
If I wanted my friends to know about my blog, I’d tell them about it… 😦 Am I anonymous as long as I don’t authorize Facebook/etc to do anything? Or will this thing find any blog registered with the mail address I’m using on Facebook?
If you have never authorized any of the services for your account and use an email address nobody knows about, we can’t match up friends. If you need to use a different email address you can do something as simple as the + trick.
Either I have NO friends or this doesn’t work.
Or maybe you need to convince your friends to use WordPress. 😉
I just found friends I have no idea are using WordPress. This is so cool 🙂
This is great! thanks so much for the advice and help. Great to connect with my contacts through WordPress. Didn’t realise so many were avid bloggers.
Thanks for your reply Nick. This doesn’t worry me personally because my blog is an activism blog & I want readers to find it, but I would be really concerned about this feature if I wanted to have a blog to express my feelings about life under a pseudonym. To have to hide the blog to maintain privacy would stop others from connecting with me – & then what is the point of having a blog. I might not want my mother & or my boss at work to find the blog & ascertain it is mine. I love WordPress & recommend it as a blogging platform often, but this feature has inherent privacy issues in my opinion.
Oh I really don’t know how to make people know about my blog and to have friends if possible. Any help there please?
The best thing you can do is connect your blog with Publicize, which makes it easier for us to match up friends.
I guess I’m one of the few who doesn’t care much for this. I would know if one of my friends had a blog. I think there was a link that was replaced by this, about comments I’d mad, which I believe has been moved to the other side of the screen. I preferred that link being where it was, since Ilike to surf back through comments.
Have you checked out Comment Notifications? The Notifications are displayed to the left of the User menu in your toolbar.
Yes, I know. That’s a different format. (You just can’t please all the bloggers all the time, can you?)
Great. Now that I know WHAT to do perhaps someone can direct me to a page that tells me HOW. Where is the page illustrated above? How do I authorize WordPress to do anything? Where can I find WordPress HELP? Thanks.
You can click on the link for Find Friends in the post or we also added a shortcut to your user menu in the upper right of the toolbar.
Outstanding choice, I may say… thanks to this feature, we might be able to find out who of our friends have blogs. Sometimes you just talk face to face, on the phone or on chat for HOURS with someone, and you discuss many things without bringing the blog issue on the table. Now you will know that without having to ask… thanks agian, WordPress
Awesome! Can’t wait to use it… Curiosity killed the cat indeed.
Great help. Could really put this to good use.
This is very helpful. I wish you would also make it easier to search for and find blogs on a particular subject, and it would also be nice if you could build like a public group of blogs on a particular topic. I’m kind of new to wp so maybe those features are already there and I just haven’t looked/tried hard enough…
Check out Topics in your Reader.
Seems like you have to be extremely popular ‘before’ you acquire a lot of blogging friends…blogging communities are exceptionally insular.
Absolutely ridiculous idea. If i wanted friends to know about my blog i’d tell them. What next? Finding people by their IP address? WP has become stalkers paradise, just like Facebook.
Very useful, but it was disappointing to see that only 4 from 619 are blogging in WordPress. 😦
Haha I knew something was off before when they couldn’t find more than five of my Twitter friends…cheers for the update. Works great.
This feature is fine, but why is it in the dropdown at the top right? It’s not as if it’s a tool that people are going to use regularly. ‘Comments I’ve Made’, on the other hand, is used extremely regularly. So why has that been replaced with this new feature?
Find Friends is built into the Reader on the WordPress.com home page where you can discover new blogs, follow blogs, read all of the latest posts from the blogs you follow, etc. We added the link to the User toolbar menu for easy access.
I agree, this is a cool tool to use to network more. I didn’t even think that maybe some people I know would have a blog… duhhhhh! lol
…because this worked so well with Google Buzz.
Awesome. All I need now are friends.
Incredilicious!!!! Merci beaucoup! Keep microwaving those ideas!
Good to know so many friends are using the WordPress. I will try to keep track…
It was nice if I could get acquainted with the great bloggers in the world
Reblogged this on Blog Egomaniac.
I agree with Jacqueline. This functionality goes against privacy standards.
I am not worried about my own blogs (they are all public) but I have found some blogs from people I know that are obviously made to be anonymous. They might want to share their feelings being anonymous. And now I have found them. I think you should really let the people choose whether if they want to be found or not.
The blog is not the person, and privacy settings should be addressed independently.
I actually found a few folks using this! thanks for the tip!
Reblogged this on Desingh's Blog.
Reblogged this on arabia4serv1dotcom1.
This idea was very impressive for me now i connect my friend’s they are on @tweeter or @Google.
Seems like so few of my “friends” blog these days, everyone is lazy and just uses twitter or facebook to share… Anyhow I am glad to see others still like to share not only the things that interest them but also their opinion!
One of the actions I would like you guys at WordPress.com to do is improve your search function on the .com servers, as there are loads of blogs I would love to read but am unable to find on your existing search engine.
Awesome. Really like the new improvements!
Nick, great tool to use not only to find friends with WordPress blogs, but will help get more views to your blog as well. Great post. Thanks.
like this
This is great. Thank you, I just did that and found FB friends, that I had no idea are using WordPress. Very useful.
I think this is such a good idea! I probably shan’t be using it as I publish the majority of my stories anonymously, but all the same I think this is a brilliant way to connect for those who would like to.
Really like
I have been using WordPress for months as a website but this is the first time that I am seeing this part of it. This is pretty nice.
This is great! thanks so much for the advice and help. Great to connect with my contacts through WordPress. Didn’t realise so many were avid bloggers.
How do i know if i have a follower of my post blog…i dont have friends to be connected with….
Check out https://wordpress.com/support/followers/
This is great! thanks so much for the advice and help. Didn’t realise so many were avid bloggers.
I have been blogging since April and glad to know there is this additional feature. Good deal!
What if you don’t want your blog to be found by your friends?
Please see some of the earlier comments and responses.
Seems this line-of-discussion is completely (99+% ?). How to find ‘friends’ who are (1) Facebook, (2) Twitter, or (3) Google. I don’t engage in any of those. Seems I’m gonna have a bit of a challenge “finding friends” (& forester, while I’m at it).
None of my friends/family blog………NOO
Lets see where are my friends 🙂