Blog Friends is closing

We’re very sorry to announce that Blog Friends is to close down.

When i-together raised some seed funding back in the summer of 2007, Benjie, Jof and I fully anticipated taking Blog Friends onto great things, and we worked as hard as we could to make that happen.

Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River.

Because Blog Friends was so original and quite ambitious, we had no way of projecting accurately just how many users we could welcome before our solution began to creak. We hoped for 100,000. It turned out that 20,000 was closer to the mark. And now that we have around 27,000 users signed up, Blog Friends has been brought pretty much to its knees (as you will have noticed from the increasing frequency of the error messages you may have been seeing).

At the same time, the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.

What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.

We’re shutting down, as of today.

Jof, Benjie and I would like to offer you our heartfelt thanks for all your support and encouragement, and our sincere apologies for the annoyance of all those error messages and now the complete cessation of the Blog Friends service.

We had an amazing time building Blog Friends with you, and we have learned so much—about technology and business, but mostly about ourselves, each other, and all you wonderful people.

Finally, some of you may know that we have been working since the New Year on a sister service to Blog Friends, Buzzspotr.com, which we hoped to launch quickly, create a “buzz”, raise funding, then get back to work on rebuilding Blog Friends from the ground up. However, we have recently had to refocus on our contracting work (see brainbakery.com and weaverluke.com for details) to support ourselves before being able to launch Buzzspotr.

We still hope that Blog Friends will rise from the ashes, and that Buzzspotr will see the light of day, before too very long. If you would like to keep tabs on our progress, you can do so at i-together.com, weaverluke.com and brainbakery.com blogs, and on twitter: benjiegillam, jofarnold and weaverluke.

Thanks again and we hope your Blog Friending was happy.

Luke, Jof and Benjie—the Blog Friends team