Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Looks like Bloglines Citations is Kaput!:

It’s been almost a week since Bloglines Citations responded with anything other than…

There is a problem with the database. Please try again later 

I hope Mark reads this. But since Citations is broken he’ll have to use Feedster to find it :-( 

I wonder if this might be a point where Blogines starts to have more scalability problems. I have to admit that they’ve scaled pretty well or at least avoided the issues becoming publicly aware. Every service seems to have problems sooner or later (Rojo, Technorati, Feedster, Friendster, all come to mind) and scaling is hard.

At first it seems like an opportunity for you to nab some users from your competitor but sooner or later you’ll have similar problems. At the end of the day it just ends up hurting consumers.

The main issue is that the tools most people are using just don’t scale. Building a cluster that can handle the number of transactions necessary is a very difficult problem. Hopefully in the next few years we will have Open Source tools which will allow even the novice and small company to build a decent and scalable cluster and have it scale.