Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

I think there might be a pending ping crisis:

Ping servers have been a key feature of the blogosphere, but there is something fundamentally worrying about them. As comprehensive coverage is a key battleground for blog search engines and portals, how can the currently free and (almost) open services offered by weblogs.com, blo.gs, etc. resist greater and greater claims on their value? Secondly, as this graph of weblogs.com suggests, as the number of pings grows, how can underfunded services like weblogs.com be considered reliable?

This is dead on. It’s a huge problem actually. It mirrors the problems I’ve seen with IDE tool vendors. Everyone wants your services but no one is willing to pay. The problem is complex enough that Open Source just doesn’t do a very good job and at the end of the day it’s not really that rewarding.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of early benefits for hosting ping service but in the long run it seems to be a big difficult:

1. Everyone wants to spam you.
2. You’re not a consumer level service so you can’t run Ads to make money.
3. The more traffic you get the more your costs go up.
4. Scaling a system is difficult once you get to that volume.
5. All your pings need to be delivered fast (see #4).

Maybe this means that only the big boys like Technorati, Google, and Microsoft can play in this space. I’ve heard rumors that RSA wants to add crypto and then host ping services. They really grok these centralization problems and jump on them. PKI is an example. There’s a crisis in crypto in that you’re never sure if your key is valid. They jumped in and used this crisis to make a profit.

This scares me. Ping services need to stay open. They need to stay small and somewhat independent from the Big 5 .coms.

How are we going to fund these services? Maybe there can be a ping foundation to collect funds in order to help run a non-profit ping server? Maybe you can have service level differentiators based on Alexa traffic. The more traffic your site gets the more you have to pay your ping host.

Of course there’s nothing preventing a small organization to host a free pinger but it seems to me that people would pay for a better ping service. I’d pay to have my ping provider remove spam. TailRank has an internal spam prevention technology but I’d prefer not to do it in the first place.