Its been a long week at Blogrolling HQ and while I can’t report that the good ship Blogrolling.com is seaworthy again, I did want to give you all an update before the weekend.
We got hit pretty hard by the forces of evil, so we had to restrict which functions were available via Blogrolling.com. For now, this includes most account and blogroll management features. No changing your passwords, updating your rolls, etc. In the meantime, we are still serving Blogrolls.
Behind the scenes, we’ve got a couple of parallel projects underway.
a) bringing back affected services safely and responsibly. We want to ensure that your data is safe, so we’re doing an extensive review of the affected services, making slight adjustments here and there, and restoring individual services. This won’t be a quick process, so don’t expect to see full functionality restored in the next few days. It may be up to a few weeks before basic services are fully restored. I realize how much this sucks, but we want to make sure that we don’t affect the overall security of the system and the basic dependability of core roll serving. Like I said earlier, we’re committed to keeping the lights on, but they will be dimmed for a little while.
b) Blogrolling 2.0. I had originally scheduled to launch this almost 2 years ago, but then I got involved in some other small projects for Tucows that sucked up 100% of my attention and 100% of the resources I had intended on using for BR2. In the meantime, BR1 kept chugging along, quietly growing and generally doing exactly what it promised to do. Despite this lack of attention, BR1 is *huge* - we served well over 1 billion blogrolls in the last year and have more than 6 times the number of users that we had when we first took the service over wayyy back.
BR2 is intended to be a smaller, simpler version of BR1. You will see a couple of important features improved and a couple of unused features disappear. You will also see a business model attached to BR2. I’ll provide more details closer to launch, but I want to get this out in the open now. It was fine to let BR1 run without a model because we weren’t making a strong investment in it (bandwidth has been our biggest cost over the last three years). Now that we’ve got people assigned to it, the costs have skyrocketed and in the current financial environment, corporate patience for digging big Web 2.0 holes and filling them up with someone else’s money is non-existent. Every dollar that we spend needs to have some ROI attached to it. You have my promise that we’re not going to ruin your Blogrolls with flash ads or something equally stupid - we will be sensitive about how we approach this and we will look for your feedback before pulling the trigger. I will not be party to implementing the business model that killed Blogrolling, rather - I’d love to be part of the community that helped turn it into a shining success.
If you have any comments, just send us a note via twitter to @blogrolling. I’ll be implementing Disqus here as soon as I get a few spare moments to hack it into the template.
Have a great weekend everyone.
/ross
