Google’s Ping Service

Just read this off the Google Blog that it has launched its own ping service just a week ago.

Just in case you are wondering what this ping thing is about. Here’s what you get from the About Google Blog Search Pinging Service FAQ:

The Google Blog Search Pinging Service is a way to inform Google Blog Search of weblog updates. These updates are then published and shared with other search engines to allow them to discover the changes to your weblogs. In addition, Google Blog Search will add submitted weblogs to the list of blogs it needs to crawl and index.

What are the implications for this?

Actually nothing much, I’ve checked the WordPress Update Services and since ping-o-matic already includes the Google RPC ping server (http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2), everything should be automated.

I also read another blog by Joseph Scott that discussed about the new ping service. Quoting Joseph:

…what happens to Ping-O-Matic now? In the short term it is unlikely that anything will change since they’ve been doing this so long. Combined with the fact that WordPress ships with Ping-O-Matic turned on by default makes for sizable user base out the gate. But over the long term will people continue use, or will more people move to Google ping? Then there are all of the other services out there that accept pings (like Technorati), what sort of long term impact will this have?

I personally think there won’t be too much impact or changes. Ping-O-Matic will just have to ping another server, and that’s it. Besides, I guess a majority of the weblogs belong to basic computer users who don’t know and in fact don’t really bother about ping services. But on the same note, I think Google is just wants to do everything! They bought YouTube just a couple of days ago, who knows what they are up to next!? Talking about that, I was just talking to my mentor over the YouTube acquisition thing yesterday and he is saying something like anything that grows too big will eventually disintegrate. How true is that?