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Blo.gs Lives On

Do you guys remember Blo.gs? In addition to being a cool domain, it’s a ping-update service like Ping-O-Matic that was started by Jim Winstead and acquired by Yahoo in June of 2005.

Some exciting news today: Yahoo! is transferring blo.gs to Automattic for safekeeping and further development. I’ve been a long-time fan of the service, and it even inspired the early WordPress feature which reordered your blogroll based on update times.

We’re looking forward to beefing up the service and giving it a refresh, while continuing its reputation for reliability. It makes me nostalgic to hear the name “blo.gs” again, I even still have the t-shirt they made for a Feedmesh meetup years ago. (For a big blast from the past, check out the discussion around feedmesh and real-time, distributed updates. Everything old is new again.) Major kudos to Yahoo! for giving us the chance to do so — I think most companies would have just shuttered it.

Toni has a few more thoughts.

53 replies on “Blo.gs Lives On”

So, when compared to Ping-O-Matic, what are some of the key points of difference? Do both services compliment each other or overlap? I don’t understand the reason for the acquisition.

They mostly overlap. Mostly we wanted to make sure this part of blog infrastructure didn’t get shut down and so offered to take it over and continue running it. Lots of folks have it in their ping lists, etc.

Overlap? I never thought so.

The Blo.gs service filled a role almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike an RSS aggregator. It accepted pings, then it provided two distinct sets services based on the update info: 1) User services for making a list of favorite sites, and seeing when they updated, plus blogroll widgets that you could embed in your own site. 2) XML data streams of updates (a virtual firehose of blog update times). This tied in to the whole feedmesh idea mentioned.

Ping-O-Matic is ping aggregation: one ping redistributed to multiple other services (including blo.gs). I think at one time we had a page that showed the most recent pings (but I think it was for internal/admin use only). Does the API for checking update times still work? I had always hoped it would be used to revive the blogroll ordering feature in WordPress.

I’m curious to see what new and interesting things might arise from the merging of the massive Ping-O-Matic update stream with the blo.gs service. Especially since Ping-O-Matic was originally my baby. 🙂

Sure I remember Blo.gs – Yahoo beat my bid for buying it when it was up for sale. I wanted to have a ping server to do contextual analysis on each and every post.

There be value in those ping servers … congrats and well deserved to watch over them given the success of pingomatic and the amount of pinging wp.com and org does..

Have been using blo.gs before switching to Bloglines and Google Reader afterwards. Always was waiting for Yahoo! doing something with blo.gs or somehow integrating it.

Now I am excited what are Automattic’s plans for blo.gs!

Matt, you got the blo.gs T-shirt.. But, did you also get a FeedMesh T-Shirt? I gave them out at the meeting we at PubSub.com sponsored during Gnomedex…. I think you were there…

YES! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Now don’t do anything stupid or douchebaggy with it, or I’ll be trashing you like I’ve been trashing Yahoo! for years. 8)

Awsome! This means that at last bloggers will never see in the near future this silly message that appeares they automaticaly ping blogs mentioning that unable to ping ‘blo.gs’ . 🙂

Worthy that you put on the T-shirt again and Yahoo! 😉

Yes, I remember this site.. very old.. it got stuck in time and I am happy that you acquired it now.. I’m sure you will bring it back to life. 🙂

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