blogger pro is dead... long live blogger pro!

so the latest rumor on the blogger grapevine [actually the bloggerpro2 yahoo group] is that google/pyra has decided to fold the features of blogger pro into the free blogger service. as it's been reported, plans are to unveil this on the general public next week but i figured i might as well contribute to internet rumors and post a little something something here. the mails have been trickling down to the newer users first from an address at trakken.com which corresponds to neotonic - an email crm provider who was acquired by google back on april 24th of this year. a bit of the email has been reproduced below for posterity...

"Hi there. Evan Williams here, co-founder of Pyra/Blogger."

"I wanted to give you a heads-up about something we're announcing shortly: We're no longer offering Blogger Pro as a separate product and we're folding most of the features into regular (free) Blogger."

of course since plenty of people have already paid for blogger pro in the past year and a half that it's been available there'd naturally be a lot of people honked off that something that they've just paid for is going to become free. well apparently google, being the not evil company that they are has decided to eat the cost to keep customer satisfaction high by offering everyone who has bought pro recently a blogger hoodie which is actually very cool of them. since i've had pro since the start and haven't gotten notice to renew my account since i've had it i doubt i'll get the hoodie offer. *shrug*

when i bought pro pyra was going thru some bad times. hell, if i recall correctly pro was introduced to get some sort of pay model going to keep blogger alive. even if a few of the promised features never came to fruition and sometimes it felt like i was paying to take place in a large clicnical trial i knew that i was paying to keep a company that gave me a voice online alive. but i digress.

recently, with the advent of typepad a lot of people started to wonder what google/pyra would do to compete with the folks at six apart since quite a few users switched over to typepad. i think this is the first part of their return volley. let's hope that google/pyra continues to add new features and returns to their position as innovators rather than implementing features that end up being a quiet "me too" - phonecam blogging, i'm looking in your direction.

updata: helping confirm the rumors is the omission of the blogger pro link on the blogger mainpage. also, upon visiting the blogger pro website the following message is being displayed below the welcome passage...

Blogger Pro ordering is currently offline while we retool. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please check back next week.

more news here as things develop.

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