well, at least it's pining for the fjords.

Blogrolling.com was an early service that I loved. Started by Jason Defillipo, blogrolling was a great way to keep up to date on various weblogs. Before people tended to use RSS readers, they used blogrolls to tracjk who had updated their blogs. Jason's site was a service that allowed you to add weblogs to your blogrolls and display it on your own weblog.

In February 2004, Jason sold the site to Tucows. Ross Rader promised to make things even better.

Well, nothing really happened until this summer when out of the blue, blogrolling.com became free.

Soon afterwards was service outages, forums full of unhappy users and endless spam posts. Blogrolling just sorta stopped working. I emailed Ross and got no response. So far there has been no word from Tucows/Blogrolling about the future of the service.

I spoke briefly to Jason and he confirmed that blogrolling was basically being euthanized. Currently the blogrolls appear, but they don't really update, making them knida useless. It's really too bad. Blogrolling's a good idea that is gone before it's time.

I guess it should make me (and you) wonder about all the neat services out there that you enjoy and what would happen if they went away. Imagine a Flickr that didn't allow new photos, you couldn't connect to AIM, or a Blogger that didn't accept new entries. This whole 'free' thing on the internet does have it's downside.

Update: Ross Rader has posted a comment about blogrolling's not so bleak future. Yea!