Your free service got shut down. Cry me a river!

It irritates me when people get all pissy that something they used on the Web for free gets turned off. See: 3,000 blogs lose their voice.

I've been through this cycle with people on my sites. Back in 2000 when I launched CoasterBuzz, it was for fun. At some point, when bandwidth was less cheap, I started to allow pop-up ads. In late 2001, I also started a coaster enthusiast club, which included the site ad-free and a couple of minor extra features. I had to do this because I wasn't going to keep paying for it out of pocket as it got more popular. This was a time when renting a box with lots of bandwidth was running a grand a month.

There was a lot of backlash from it, believe it or not, when I started to offer subscriptions. I said then what I still say, and that is that everything on the Internet has to be paid for one way or another. That's just the way it is. The thing no one counted on was that people will pay for things they care about if the price is right. Turns out $20 a year isn't so bad when you pay more than that for some magazines, and you certainly get more mileage out of a daily site than you do a magazine. Offer the right value proposition and people will pay.

But still people bitched and moaned, but yet couldn't stay away. It didn't make any sense. Now it looks like some people are going through that with this blog site. I'm surprised that Live Journal still offers freebies. I would've quit that a long time ago.

There's still another wave of disgust on the way though, and that's one where people who can make a few bucks off of their sites get blasted for being capitalist pigs. It's like you're supposed to give all that time and energy just out of the goodness of your heart and let that be your reward. I know that the coaster enthusiast community has a bit of that already, and it's ridiculous. Just as TV shows are rewarded with higher ad rates due to popularity, so it goes with Web sites. I'm not going to apologize for success. It's not like I'm buying a yacht and 4,000 square feet on land from my little Web sites!

It seems like yet another thing about the Internet that defies logic. If history is any indication, this too will eventually adjust itself to something resembling normalcy.

8 Comments

  • I think the issue is not that someone had to discontinue a free service, but in the way it was closed down without notice.

  • But what difference does it make? I mean, what are you really going to gain by knowing ahead of time?

  • I agree with df.

    When you know in advance, you are able to save your work and even search for an alternative.

    The people on weblogs.com aren't even sure if they will get a backup of their content, wich is still their intellectual property.

  • What do you gain by knowing in advance? The ability to backup and move your site. You act like this is no big deal. You either don't care at all about the content you have on this blog and wouldn't mind losing it or you are smart and responsible and have your data backed up.

  • But the majority of complaining I read had nothing to do with getting the content off, it was all about complaining that the free service was gone.



    And sorry, but if the TOS was even remotely standard, the person running the server owns your post when you make it, not you.

  • And it was by no means *free*. Dave got a lot of juice by getting the bloggers to use Radio (Userland's blogging software) at 49.95 a pop (there is no other way to post to a Manila site IIRC)and he got a lot of juice from saying, look at our cool server software, we are hosting 3K blogs. Look at all our satisfied customers.



    Dave was the owner of Userland (it is now owned by his brother) and is arguably the titular head as well. This was not joe random user shutting down a blogging service it was the proclaimed 'godfather' of Blogging. He had time to travel to Amsterdam last month, a quick note about impending doom would have been nice.



    Forewarning would have gone a long way to help people backup their data. (Note: Dave exempted 2 A-List bloggers - Scoble and Doc Searls) The hoi-polloi were not so lucky :)

  • I guess that puts things in a little more perspective. It still implies though that there are certain customer obligations there that I'm not sure actually exist.

  • Adam has got a few things wrong there.



    Manilla can be posted to directly, like this site. It's a server hosted blogging platform. This is what was running on weblogs.com for free.



    Radio pushes static html to radio.userland.com, which hasn't been turned off, it's part of the radio package.

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