'Blogger' Is Critical -Now on Life Support

By Fintan Dunne BreakForNews.com
Wed, 30 March 2005

Unless you are an active blogger, it's probably news to you that the world biggest blog hosting service 'Blogger.com' has been steadily keeling over during the last three or four days.

In the last twenty-four hours the system of posting new entries to blogs has ground to a virtual halt -with only sporadic signs of life. Blogs have become clogged with double and even trebble postings due to enthusiastic pressing of the occasionally functional 'Publish' button.

The meltdown began over the weekend of 26-28th March, as response times plummeted for new blog entry publishing attempts. Huge lags opened up between publishing posts and seeing them appear on blogs. Some bloggers entirely lost entries they were posting. Even the response seen by the general public displaying blogs fell noticably.

By Monday, the problems had compounded: blog comments became difficult; email-based blog update functions ground to a halt and automatic boogging tools like 'Blog it!' no longer worked.

By Tuesday, it was no better and Bloggers were tearing their hair out.

On Wednesday, the inevitable happened. Blogger began blocking login attempts.

They had no choice. When problems such as these persist for days, the number of publish and edit attempts begins to rise inexorably -as normal traffic is topped up by attempts to publish backlog material and edit faulty postings. The only way to recover the system is to sporadically block all publishing to ease the backlog.

And that's where we stand. Will Blogger be working again in hours -or days? Nobody knows. Or at least nobody in Blogger is saying. That's an interesting approach to customer relations you got there guys!

The only reason Blogger are getting away with this dumbed down approach is because the tech media have barely raised an eyebrow about all this. 'Blogger' is not a new system -the software is well tried and pretty stable. So, lack of computing 'oomph' seems the only plausible reason why these problems are arising.

But, we are talking about Blogger here. Blogger fer chrissake! Blogger=Google for crying out loud! These people have enough computing hardware to steer a manned Mars mission. Or should have.

What gives??

Meanwhile... (cue shark music) lurking out there, in the thickets of beta testing, is 'Yahoo 360.' This is a potential Blogger killer. Beta test users are already drooling over the features:

I got a detailed walkthrough of Yahoo! 360 this afternoon, and I have to say, the Yahoo! team has done an excellent job thinking through key details of how to not only integrate blogs and social networking, but also how to pull in elements from the Yahoo! network....

Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated “stuff” is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique – and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks. In essence, the content is being pushed to you by the service. The ability to leverage your network to get something done is what gives Y! 360 the real potential to become something even bigger.

Under ordinary circumatances, Yahoo 360 would give Blogger a helluva run for it's money. But with the current ailing state of Blogger, it doesn't stand a chance in a head-to-head with Yahoo 360. The bout would have to be halted before someone got whacked to a pulp.

(One caveat: Yahoo is copyrighting RSS feeds for beta-test
360 accounts. Oversight? Hope so, 'coz that dog won't hunt)

If you need light entertainment, consider these comments from a selected few among the legions of Blogger clients. You will be able to recognize these people in the street now.

They're the ones missing the clumps of hair.

Blogger's Comments from around the Net:

"Damn! I finally get an hour to myself tonight to read and reply to my favorite blogs and I'm getting NOWHERE. So either blogger is screwing me around or my computer is severely constipated. Damn. Anyone else having problems or am I the only lucky one this evening??? Monday, March 28, 2005

"Is anyone else having problems with Blogger's comments feature today? I've been trying to leave comments for both Màili and Lynn, but blogger just won't let me do it *sigh*. Guess I'll try again tomorrow - maybe this is a sign to stop blog-hopping and get back to work!! Tuesday, March 29, 2005

"Google needs to sink some more funds into blogger, cuz its been slow and buggy recently. Over the weekend the homepage reverted to posts from sometime in May 2003 or 2004. It's also damned near impossible to post anyting in a single shot anymore. I had to load it tice to et the last post up, and I've tried about half a doen times to zap the accidential double post I made on Sunday, but blogger just doesn't want to cooperate and spits out 500 internal server errors. I don't know. All I want is to post stuff fairly easily from damned near anywhere. Tuesday, March 29, 2005

"Wow, Blogger is giving me some trouble. Last night I couldn't access my account at all, and it took me half hour to log-in this morning. Please fix the bug. ...Please Addition: Still having problems loging on. Stupid thing. Tuesday, March 29, 2005

"In case you haven't noticed, Blogger is completely screwed up this week; you can only get in to blog maybe five minutes out of every two hours. These server problems only affect blogs with more than 500 posts, so that's why most of the old-timers are down, too. Tuesday, March 29, 2005

"Oh, look! blogger's working. jesus, it's about time. Wednesday, March 30, 2005