Since early last year, when Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion introduced me to iPings, I've relied on the multi-service Ping engine to update sites including Technorati, Weblogs.com, FeedBurner and IceRocket, alerting the services that my blog had been updated. Using a simple form, I could enter my data in iPings and hit all the services at once, rather than updating them individually, or hoping their spiders were quick.But for this entire week, iPings has gone missing, offering instead a stark notice, saying, "ipings.com is down for maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please check back soon."
But unlike Twitter, which goes down for maintenance seemingly a few times a day, iPings has never come back up, and it's tempting to think the service just might be gone - leading me to use my backup, Pingomatic, or trust the Web crawler gods.
While iPings never sported the most creative of Web layouts, and often annoyed with flashing banner ads or unreadable captchas, it simply got the job done. Now, I have to wonder if they're all done too.