The Fall of Technorati?
CEO David Sifry recently announced that he would be leaving Technorati Inc., the blog search engine company, and that eight other staff members would also be let go. These moves were generally thought of as yet another sign of Technorati's continued decline over the last few months. Today we take a look at what people are saying about Technorati and what might be done to save the apparently-ailing company.
Alex Iskold over at Read/WriteWeb had a great write-up last week of some of Technorati's biggest issues. Iskold's biggest issue with Technorati is how it has drastically shifted its focus from blogs to monetization, which has come in the form of making the Technorati homepage an aggregator of popular music and videos.
This has had the unintended consequence of exacerbating the site's already-spotty reliability; Technorati's uptime has been notoriously bad in the past and its searches have often been slow, broken, or inaccurate, hurting the user experience and Technorati's own credibility. Currently, the site's infrastructure still may be in need of an overhaul: Last week, a Technorati search for "Pronet Advertising" turned up 0 blog reactions, although this result comes and goes.
Here's the thing: I love Technorati, and so do many other bloggers. As recently as six months ago, it was a fun tool to use to keep track of your blog and what other people were saying about it. Technorati played to that deepest, most vain part of every blogger: The desire to be ranked and compared with other bloggers. And it did so incredibly effectively, in a way that was fun and addictive. Although Google Blogsearch may have the speed, it currently doesn't have the experience that Technorati once provided (and can potentially provide if things change for the better).
As a startup, Technorati has had incredible success during its few years of existence. It has won awards and received positive coverage from a variety of blogs. But in order to regain its past success, it needs to get back to basics, improve load speeds, and simplify its interface while still figuring out an unobtrusive way to monetize its services. As with all struggling businesses, such advice is easier said than done.
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Reader Comments (2)
- Pablo Palatnik, September 5, 2007
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With the fall of every giant, comes another. I think it is in fact going downhill...and fast...unless someone buys out technorati or another company is already stirring up the idea of something similar to come and overtake that space...wonder if Google has any plans...it would only make sense.
- Jim, September 11, 2007
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I love Technorati, hope they can thru this tough time.
