Thalasar Ventures

As I have mentioned in previous entries, Microsoft is shutting down BCentral. As a reminder Microsoft sent out a reminder notice last Friday, May 11, 2007.

Directory submittal, site preparation and reporting tools ending
Effective 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 18th 2007, you will no longer be able to log into and access the Submit It! service. The service’s site preparation and optimization tools, directory submittal, and reporting services will be decommissioned and any data associated with these service components will be permanently deleted from Microsoft servers. If you want to preserve any reporting information please log into the Member Center to do so before the service end date. Additional instructions can be found in our Submit It! Customer FAQ.
Continued listing on the Microsoft Small Business Directory
Also effective May 18th 2007 at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, the bCentral™ Small Business Directory will be retired. In its place, we are offering existing Submit It! customers and others who currently have bCentral Small Business Directory listings a free, grandfathered listing in the new Microsoft Small Business Directory. While we will be preserving the present directory’s link friendliness and search ranking value, slight changes will be made in the way the directory appears to the public and how you may alter your listing. Please read below and see more details about these changes in our Small Business Directory Customer FAQ.
Automatically reserving your Microsoft Small Business Directory Listing
On May 18th 2007 when the Submit It! service ends, the bCentral Small Business Directory will be converted to a read-only online business directory. This means that while the public will still be able to browse, search and view directory contents, you will not have access to the listings in order to edit your information. Other than requests by you to remove your listing, after May 18th 2007 changes may not be made to the directory’s contents.

So in other words you have this week to make any changes or updates to your Microsoft Small business directory listing. It’s really too bad that Microsoft is retiring this service. I always found it useful and opposed to Yahoo, it was responsive and gave you feedback on what the problems were with your submission and the opportunity to correct them. They were always far more responsive than Yahoo, usually getting back to you in 24 hours. The number of links that were provided by the bCentral service were also great since your virtual business card gave you SIX more outgoing links. I always used these to develop deep links into the catalogs of my various ecommerce price comparison engines. It certainly helped with authority and the deep links were great. I imagine that MS found the human overhead far too high a cost relative to the revenue generated. That’s too bad since a smaller firm could restructure bCentral and make it profitable. I am sure that MS would have wanted far too much for the directory. It’s too bad really. The same thing happened to Geocrawler as well.