Comments on Weblogs.com Discussion

A couple of comments reaction to the evolving discussion of VeriSign’s acquisition of the weblogs.com ping service…

DISCLAIMER: My comments on this blog are not official VeriSign service announcements. Repeat, not official service announcements. They reflect my understanding and attitude on the matter, but just that: I’m just one person on a large team.  Please keep that in mind generally on this blog, and specifically for the comments below.

·        Niall Kennedy writes:

I expect VeriSign will introduce an authentication certificate for ping submissions to its servers. One possible upsell on the listening side is the ability to be alerted to a blog update before anyone else, similar to how stock market systems delay stock quotes to non-premium customers. VeriSign could also sell more personal authentication keys to bloggers using stand-alone services such as Movable Type or WordPress to allow for the rebroadcast of a ping submission.

He’s right, these are possible ideas for premium services. But let me say that I really have never liked the 20-minute delay for NASDAQ quotes, as much as I understand the rationale behind it. I believe the consensus of the team working on the “real-time web” at VeriSign is focused on the “real-time” part. We are looking to build “intelligent infrastructure” that offers powerful building blocks from which innovative network apps can be made. I think forcing additional latency and delays into the information stream would be extremely counterproductive – it would degrade the quality of the services that could be built on top of the infrastructure.  Everyone, including VeriSign, is better off if the system is geared around clean, low-latency signaling – for all pings, all the time.

·        Stowe Boyd from CORANTE writes:

I guess I am a bit slow on these developments, but the notion that pings could be separately from the weblogs.com service as a whole and discussed like an additional element of the service -- kind of like call forwarding for your cell phone -- seemed strange. I mean, aren't pings just an essential? But then I noticed the subtly important word "basic" that precedes ping in th efirst sentence. Basic pings will remain free, so I am intuiting that non-basic pings are going to cost. So if you need a quicker ping cycle, or if your blog receives more than some basic number of pings, you are going to pay. Perhaps you will purchase a basic plan with so many pings in it, and you will pay for extra pings. Especially during peak hours.

Given Niall’s comments above and Mr. Boyd’s here, I fear I’ve given the wrong impression.  Slowing down “ping cycles” or otherwise degrading the performance of the service isn’t appealing to me at all. The goal is for all pings to circulate through the system quickly and accurately. Rather than thinking about changes in latency or timing, I’m thinking the “value-add” here will pivot around the depth or richness of the ping itself.