Kevin Burton has some thoughts on the ping servers out there - sites like blo.gs and weblogs.com, for instance. These sites take pings from blogs and other frequently updated sites, allowing various other services to notice new stuff as it gets posted. The trouble is simple - what's the viable business model for that? With Technorati, it's pretty clear - they use the ping server to feed their other search services, which they are trying to monetize. I'm not at all sure what the business model for some of these other services are. I rather suspect that they are selling information off the back end to interested parties, because there's no other model that makes sense to me.

Think about it - how many people actually go out of their way to visit these sites directly? Kevin tries to relate this to the IDE business, where he says that everyone wants the service, but no one wants to pay. There's some rough similarity there, but there's also a big difference. Unless I'm missing something, no one in the ping business is purposely offering their wares for free in order to drive the competition out of business (can you say Eclipse Foundation?).

The bottom line on ping sevices, IMHO, is that the only survivors will be those who are monetizing their service indirectly (like Technorati is trying to do). Come to think of it, that may not be that different from the IDE space...