“VeriSign Buys Weblogs.com for $2.3 Million”

Weblogs.com -- which is essentially a "weblog update pinging services" -- has been purchased by VeriSign, Inc., for $2.3 Million from Scripting News, Inc (ie, Dave Winer).

In my opinion, this is mostly -- well, at least half -- about the domain name. That's a very, very good domain name, obviously.

The service it runs is important, that's true. There are lots of secondary services that check the very long list of recently updated weblogs on an hourly or daily basis. As the number of weblogs has grown over the years, the load on that server has grown by several orders of magnitude, to the point that it's almost unusable by people sitting in front of their browsers: the only 'clients' patient enough to use it are the services that ping it and the automated scripts that check it.

So, Verisign paid a couple million dollars for one of the most valuable domain names imaginable. The domain name comes with a service they'll have to run themselves which can't generate any cash on its own. They claim that they're going to maintain the service as "open and free," which is actually the only way it could be done (*nobody* would pay to ping). With a relatively small investment (less than $100K), they could/should/will set up a new ping server that can handle the load and not require constant babying.

My Prediction

Unfortunately, knowing Verisign -- part of one of the most hated companies on the internet -- they will screw this up completely. Perhaps they'll require free registration before your weblog can submit pings, or they'll change the ping API. Maybe they'll come up with some even more clever way to totally annoy the weblog-publishing masses. People will react in horror that they've broken something so important, but eventually Verisign will reveal just how they plan to make money with this domain name and eventually people will shut up.

Congrats

Congratulations to Dave, though!

Now he has enough money (again) to do whatever it is he's planning with his outliner, or to go back to driving around the country, or to start pushing the next XML dialect that everybody will use and most of the digerati will hate. :-) Maybe he has something else up his sleeve! As he's made clear over the years (today being a good example), the man can talk an awful lot without ever telling us what's really going on in his head.