Technorati jumps the shark

Now here’s an interesting post.

Jason Kottke, as a-list as bloggers come, gets stuck into Technorati, the webservice that has long been the darling of the blogging classes (because, of course, it lets us see who’s talking about our work).

Now, the interesting thing isn’t that Kottke’s saying anything that’s not demonstrably true - Technorati is unreliable, it does miss stuff, it is frustratingly inconsistent, it is annoying that the people behind it do lots of PR stunts without tackling the underlying problems with their service.

No, the interesting thing is that Kottke’s saying it at all. His post represents the puncturing of hype around Technorati. It’s an emperor’s new clothes moment when someone with the clout of Kottke calls something for what it is.

Cool new web services, when they come from cool little startups, often get an amazingly easy ride from bloggers who would otherwise prize themselves on their laser-like ability to see through hype. No established brand would dare launch anything as flaky as Technorati - not without smothering it in beta stickers and then embarking on a rapid programme of post soft-launch improvement.

Some of those startups - like Flickr - rapidly improve to a level where they justify the hype. Others, like Technorati (and Altavista and Blogger before it) trundle on, failing to improve for whatever reason, and eventually get overtaken by upstarts who meet expectations better.

Google did for Altavista, but it took Google to save Blogger, and even then you’d have to argue Blogger’s long since been overtaken in terms of functionality and buzz (maybe even market share of live blogs) by Typepad and Live Journal.

So I guess the question is not (just) who’s going to save Technorati, but who’s going to step up and do something that actually justifies the hype?

Google, again?

COMMENTS / 9 COMMENTS

MS’s Robert Scoble was having a go at Technorati about a month ago, and got into a very public and much-linked back-and-forth with Dave Sifry, David Weinberger, and others about its flaws. (Dave Winer has also, shockingly, been having a go at Technorati.) Scoble claims that MS is working on something that will rival Technorati. Scoble says he uses Technorati, Bloglines Citations, and this secret tool to track blog buzz.

I don’t think Technorati ever got a uniformly easy ride. Show me any website visited by more than fifty people on a daily basis - whether it offers supposed tools or not - and I’ll show you a website that someone has felt particular pride in criticising. But in June, when I noticed that Technorati just was not picking up my posts, tag as I might, I wondered why they weren’t getting more negative press. Suddenly, all I seemed to encounter was negative press on Technorati.

I’m glad that Technorati got released, flaws and all, though. Aren’t we all better off for the competition going on to better it?

Jackie Danicki thought this on Aug 21 05 at 5:53 pm

I think Technorati’s been getting a pretty tough time for a month or two now — and, generally, rightly so. Kottke’s voice is just the most mainstream of those to criticise it (I seem to remember you giving them a hard time too, Jackie) but he’s far from alone.

Pioneering services are important, and deserve the respect that making big changes brings them (Alta Vista, Blogger, et al)… but ultimately, if they don’t do their job properly, they struggle.

I like Dave Sifry, but there’s little doubt that they’ve forgotten the golden rule of any company: before you think about anything else, do the thing you do *well*.

bobbie thought this on Aug 22 05 at 10:43 pm

PS: also, I think some of the problems came when Technorati started up with their whole “there are Xm weblogs in the world, because that’s how many we track”. That kind of ownership is the kind of things bloggers just hate.

bobbie thought this on Aug 22 05 at 10:44 pm

We are working on core services. Keyword search is much better over the last month, but we do need to improve the link search, and we are working on that too.

My apologies if you are having problems, and do email me at kmarks@technorati.com if your blog is not being indexed as you’d like it to be.

Kevin Marks thought this on Aug 25 05 at 8:11 am

Kevin, with all due respect, my problem isn’t with blogs not being indexed. It’s with the service falling over time and again: I can rarely perform more than one search without getting a “sorry”.

And while I’m not saying you’re not working hard - certainly, on my last visit to see you guys, there was plenty of industry - I think there’s a widespread perception that the core service is being forgotten in favour of attention-grabbing add-ons. That’s got to be rooted somewhere in real user experience, hasn’t it?

bobbie thought this on Aug 25 05 at 9:03 am

Bobbie, I think Kevin’s comment may have been a response to mine. (Kevin, there’s email coming your way. Thanks.)

Jackie Danicki thought this on Aug 25 05 at 3:18 pm

Neil, thanks for the comments and frank feedback. The problem is primarily that our core link search (also known as Cosmos) is going through a serious rehab right now. Keyword search went through some serious scaling upgrades last month, and is working much better now. We’re powering onwards with the Cosmos upgrades, and expect that things will gradually get better through September, with the work completed by the end of September.

Sorry that things haven’t been meeting your expectations. We’re working on fixing these core issues first, even as we deal with continued growth in the service, dealing with spam and fake blogs, and just the general growth of the blogosphere.

Thanks again for your honest feedback.

Dave

David Sifry thought this on Aug 25 05 at 5:10 pm

doesn’t mean i can’t respond, though, does it, jackie?

i think the point’s the same, essentially: that it’s not doing what it’s meant to. Personally my problem - and, I’d imagine, most people’s problem - isn’t my blog interacting with Technorati, it’s being able to search the thing in the first place. (though the point about bloggers giving it a tough time because it was ignoring them is relevant too).

I do appreciate the honesty Dave saying “yep, it’s not up to scratch”, though.

bobbie thought this on Aug 25 05 at 6:27 pm

Bobbie, I was just clarifying that I don’t think Kevin believed your problem was not being indexed. Nothing more.

And I have to say, despite my gripes with Technorati (which probably reached their height when the site turned into a political one, with all the Live8 promotion that assumed we all share a warm fuzzy feeling about the Make Poverty History campaign), I think they’re doing an excellent job of being transparent and open about what the problems are and how they’re working on them. For anyone who’s ever worked in IT - and I have - you know how annoying it is to have users all over your back when you’re busting your backside to fix things. Maintaining a polite and friendly honesty about what you’re doing to improve things isn’t easy, and it’s refreshing to see.

Is Technorati flaky? Yes. Is it pretty clear why that is? I think so. Are they working hard to change that? I think so. Are they talking to their users in an open way about all this? Seems like it to me. No matter how much the outages and problems irritate me, I’m hard pressed to rake them over the coals for not being flawless.

Jackie Danicki thought this on Aug 26 05 at 9:08 am

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