Tucows To Close Blogrolling

The end of days for some of the first great wave of blogging tools continues with news that Tucows intends on shutting old school third party blog roll service Blogrolling.

Founded in approx January 2002, Blogrolling offered hosted third party blogrolls, these days a fairly irregularly used feature on blogs which allowed blog owners to list and link to blogs of friends and blogs of similar topics in their sidebar. The service came at a time where blogrolls were not regularly offered as a standard feature in blog management systems.

Acquired by Tucows in February 2004, Blogrolling grew for some years, and offered services such as hot blogs lists based on the number of blogroll links offered among members. At acquisition the service was used on 1.5 million blogrolls.

The rise of WordPress, and hosted blogging platforms that offered blogrolls as a standard feature on blogs saw demand for the service fade, although some people have continued to use it over the years.

The exact date Blogrolling will be closed has not been announced, with Tucows only telling Darnell at The Blog Herald that an announcement will be made in the next week with the company hoping to give users time to export their links out of the system prior to final closure.

Blogrolling joins the recent announcement of the closure of Bloglines, and the acquisition of SixApart in the list of first generation blogging services and companies closing or disappearing as stand alone entities.