Weblogs.com

Allready a lot has been said about the sudden closing down of weblogs.com, a service maintained by Dave Winer. And it was to tempting not to comment on this.

First some comments on the provider side. David Winer was absolutely in his right to close the service down. He did not ask for any money, it was a free service. It was a service maintained by a single person.  It was however a service with some 4000 customers (I think). If you have so many ‘customers’ then you moved yourself into some obligations. I do not know, but I hope that Dave made it clear upfront that any customer was using the service to his own risk. That there were no guarantees for continuous service or uptime. Although I do not think that you can blame Dave on pulling the plug, it was free after all, I think he should not have offered a service to so many users. So many users blur the lines what you are doing. I assume that this is also due to the fact that the service was moved from Userland to Dave’s premises. I guess he wanted to be nice, but that turned out to be unrealistic. That event should have been a good opportunity to wind the service down. It surely is a lesson for anybody that intends to offer a service on its own. Make it clear to your customers what you are offering and what the guarantees are. But do not let this stop you and experiment with new services. This is what makes Internet so interesting.

And then the user side. The users have been enjoying the free service for years. It even seems that they became dependent on it. But why stay with Dave’s service? Did you not know that it had become a one man operation? Were you not willing to pay for the service? Why not if it was so important to you? And make backups? It just sounds silly for the users. Anyway I hope that Dave will have time to give them their data and all turns out well. But next time be warned if you subscribe to a service. Also look at the service provider. Who is he (or they)? How are they doing financially? Can you really expect a future? If not, then take your precautions. You and only you are responsible for your own data.

By the way, I pay for my hosting (Futurequest) and Blog tools (pMachine). I am however very lazy in making backups.