Blogger starting to get some heat

Blogger has become the Mordor of the blogosphere
But the question is whether they will care. First stop: Bezahlt(dot)Org, who points out that Blogger's Status Page had a notice posted on March 11 (a week ago) that the service was aware of the "stability problems" with Blogger and was working to correct them (a week ago, I remind you).

Most of these problems were caused by an increased amount of load on the blogger.com application servers. We have addressed this problem by increasing the number of machines that serve the site. However, there is more work to do. In addition to bringing on more machines and completing additional capacity planning, we are also working to identify and correct problematic database queries. These queries are poorly optimized and lead to the increased load that jeopardized the service in the past few days.

As a Blogger user, I completely understand how unacceptable the performance has been in the past few days and it is the focus of the engineering team to fix these issues.

As bezahlt says, "Fix it, please, don't tell me how unacceptable it is to you."

Now Gerard Van der Leun weighs in:

[T]he endless server death spirals of the last few days are notable. ...

What accounts for this? The utter lawlessness that has infected Blogger combined with, according to Blogger's Blogger Buzz, a "shortage of electricity."

I'm sorry, but the last time I looked at Google, the owner of Blogger, the company's market cap was in the billions, and its rep for hiring only the brightest undimmed. So what accounts for Blogger? True, Blogger is free, but that's just part of Google's 'Engulf and Devour While Not Being Evil' business plan.

You get what you pay for, you say? True enough as far as it goes, but it seems to me that a "free service" that sucks in millions of people and is poised to suck in millions more, needs to take better care of its space lest it become seen as a kind of content Ponzi scheme.

And he shows how Blogger's own pages indicate that somehow, Spamblogs seem to be doing fine while the rest of us manage to post unreliably, if at all. (I have learned that I cannot count on any post I write actually appearing on my site, including this one. This morning I have experienced the publish page telling me that my post published 100% complete, only to find it does not appear on the site, nor on the "edit" page's index of posts.)

Yes, this service is free, so one might say I have no right to complain. I would reply that Blogger is now worth every cent I pay for it. I fact, though, my mere presence as a user, if not actually a "customer" in the traditional sense, is actually money to Google, for that is one way Google's market cap and stock price are determined. In a word, Blogger/Google needs me worse than I need it. And as I have said before, as soon as I can do so I will flee Blogger like Hobbits running from Mordor.