The Boy Who Cried “Blogger”
Let me just get this straight right at the beginning: I love Blogger, and I love Ev. He and his former colleagues created a revolutionary web application that has allowed thousands of people to publish easily on the web. For this, he is to be commended highly. Highly.
But come on. Blogger hasn’t added a useful feature since I started using it, 18 months ago. First there was the vaporware of Blogger Pro, where the hundreds or thousands of people eagerly willing to support the app by paying a small amount for it were thwarted. And since then, quite often Ev will come on his blog or on the main page of Blogger and say something like, “Big stuff coming. Not sure when, but soon.”
Nothing. Nada. Zip.
I realize that he’s just one guy, and he can’t spend a lot of time developing if he’s just trying to keep the thing running, which from recent evidence is a job in itself. But then, please Ev, don’t drop vague hints about “great new stuff” that won’t happen. It’s just mean. If there really is something coming, tell your loyal subjects what and when. These vague announcements are incredibly frustrating, and I bet I’m not the only one who feels this way. For all his greatness, Ev has squandered more goodwill than George Bush Sr. after the Gulf War.
I’m still amazed that there aren’t any real challengers to Blogger. Hard-to-install, techie server apps like Greymatter and Movable Type are fantastic, but they don’t pick up the mantle of easy publishing for everyone. I for one would like to see Ev keep that award. But it doesn’t look good. Prove me wrong, Ev.
The big problem with Blogger is having it all on one centralized system. If he could create a distributed application that did the same thing, there wouldn’t be this huge problem when the Blogger servers went down.
Ev’s announcements always make me cringe. At best, nothing happens. At worst, it crashes for a couple days.
I would note that Evan is hiring another programmer. I have a lot of faith in what’s to come.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Good words.
Adam (et al),
I appreciate your frustration. Believe me, no one feels it more strongly than I.
I’ve intentionally been vauge with promises lately specifically *because* Blogger Pro was vaporware for so long. It was vaporware because our company fell apart (along with a few hundred others, at least, in case you didn’t notice). It’s taken a long time to recover. I have been making hints because I want people to know that there is stuff going on, but I want to be very careful about specifics before I am ready to deliver.
In my defense, I know I’ve lost a lot of goodwill from Blogger users, and that kills me, but I don’t believe I’ve *squandered* it. That implies it could have been easily helped. By all rights and expectations, Blogger should be dead by now. It’s not. It’s growing faster than ever in terms of users and usage has increased 30% this *month*. It’s also making enough money to survive. At the same time, reliability, while still occasionally lacking has increased substantially since several months ago when we had lots of people (in comparison) working on it.
The biggest challenges, however, have come from internal issues that I can’t talk about publicly. A major one was recently been solved, which was threatening the very existence of the company for the last several months and severely squelching progress. Simply put, it’s been hellish, and while the results aren’t obvious publicly, I’m proud of having accomplished what I have in the last few months.
Having overcome these problems, I am, finally, in rebuilding mode again. Stacy is right, I have hired another programmer. I have a working copy of a completely revamped Blogger on my desktop. I have other people I’m working with. We are excited and getting things done.
But, sorry, I’m going to continue to be vague for now.
Thanks for your feedback,
Ev.
There you go hinting again, Ev. If you have “a completely revamped Blogger on your desktop,” let’s see it!