Does anyone use BlogRolling.com any more?
I still see blog rolls all over the blogosphere, but there isn’t as much attention paid to them now as a year ago. More importantly, BlogRolling.com itself has changed.
If you keep an eye on BlogRolling.com you’ll notice that, for the last four months, it’s been quiet. Following its acquisition by software site Tucows.com, the normally busy news page was stone silent from 14 May 2004 through 9 September 2004.
During that time apparently nothing changed on BlogRolling.com.
When the news did come back, it was to announce the migration of the site to Tucows’ servers, technical problems related thereto, and the fact that BlogRolling.com’s management were completely oblivious to those issues for days.
Does the blogosphere still need a service like BlogRolling.com?
Should it be BlogRolling.com, or is it time for a competitor to rise up?
Now that BlogRolling.com is owned by the not-so-cool Tucows, BR doesn’t inspire the same warm and fuzzy brand loyalty as it did as a one-man operation started as a labor of love. So, does the blogosphere want BR to continue even it manages to get its act together?
Neville Hobson
“Does the blogosphere still need a service like Blogrolling.com?’ I’d say yes.
The key bit in the question is “like Blogrolling”. The fiasco of the past 4 days will have done damage to Blogrolling’s reputation; how they develop their customer relationships in the coming weeks in particular will be important in how those relationships are maintained.
It’s a competitive world and there are other such services out there.
Meanwhile, I’m goimng to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while longer.
Ross Rader
All points well taken. Small point of correction though - we had migrated the service to Tucows NOC at IBM many moons ago - that’s part of why things were so quiet for so many months - things were relatively stable which let my dev team and I focus on what we wanted to do with the next version of Blogrolling. We weren’t looking to come in and turn the service upside down from what Jason had built because he had done a pretty fine job of it.
Last week’s events were regrettable and it will take us a lot of time to regain the trust of our users. But I think we’re up for to the task - hopefully we’ll be able to convince our customers of this before too long as well.
Thanks for the trackback - as I mentioned, all of your points are spot on and well appreciated.
jim
Spot on? Yes. Try to regain the trust of their users? Proving that they are alive and concerned with their users concerns would be helpful in that case… And when is this new version coming out? It’s been months now and there is still nothing on the site about it. A tiny upgrade like changing a username took months to get in place. Even if they do reimpliment Paypal for Blogroll renewal, it will be doubtful if I bother to renew mine.