I said it before, and I'm saying it again. A few years ago, Rojo was my favourite news aggregator - a news feeds reader with Digg-like properties all rolled into one. Then Six Apart bought it over. The design was changed and somehow I felt it looked less spontaneous and too structured. Many people seemed to stopped voting for most of the articles.
Then a major power outage happened, and since then Rojo has been reeling. After several days it still hasn't got back on its feet. To quote:
Rojo's collapse is a cautionary tale for Web 2.0 companies: When your entire service and brand are wrapped up in "always on" availability, downtime has a tipping point, where it transforms from a customer service problem into an unrecoverable death spiral.
It's been down too long in the Web 2.0 boxing ring. The countdown is over. Many say they're not going back. I too have stopped using Rojo because Google Reader is better at gathering the news I want, and Digg is so much more happening. And if I want to find out about user-contributed content in Singapore, there's already Ping and Tomorrow. For tech news, there are lots of good blogs out there, starting with Techcrunch.
So, I don't really need Rojo anymore and it seems that most of its users will get used to not using it, too.
[Update: Rojo is back up, as of 7 Aug 2007.]
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