So I’m interested in what you folks’ experience has been with Technorati. Mine is best summed up in the headline.
It seems to be that as they build a richer, more finished site, it becomes less and less functional – both because of what appears to be sheer incompetence, and worse – by design.
Some cases in point:
I use a Treo 650. Technorati Mobile – http://mobile.technorati.com – brings up a search box, a list of top searches this hour, and a “what’s happening on the web right now in:” and a list of stories that are highly linked.
If I fill in the search block, and click on “Search”:, you’d expect to get a set of Technorati search results. Go try it and see what happens. Nothing. Nothing has happened for weeks, if not months. Has anyone at Technorati even bothered to look?And the technical geniuses at Technorati decided to redo their UI to a level of desigm matching their technical acumen.
There’s a basic rule of good Information Architecture that I swear by:
1) The same control always does the same thing.
2) I ought to be able to get to the underlying data without a PhD is user interface design.
Take a look at this:
Technorati breaks Rule 1 on the most commonly-used controls on their site; and worse, when they do break the rule, there is flatly no way to get to the targeted post, and the primary control doesn’t take me to the blog, but to the Technorati page about the blog.
Anyone out there want to fund a small startup? Is there a startup out there I can invest in? I’m just effing tired of this and if we have to build something better to have a tool that works, that’s what we need to do.
What are you trying to do, exactly?
I prefer blogsearch.google.com, for searching out blogposts on issues.
If you are looking to see how WOC fares in importance, or authority, traffic, you already have SiteMeter, and of course, the best tool is Google Analytics. Which is very friendly on a Treo, right?
I suggest you speak to some Neo-Cons. This is precisely how their foreign policy functions.
I never saw the utility of Technorati, but it’s way cool that my post shows up in your example.
TOC, nice drive-by…very credibility-enhancing.
hypo -I use it mostly (when it worked) to track the dialog between blogs – because we have trackbacks turned off (because of the spam issue), it’s interesting to me to see who’s riffing off of something said here.
That’s one of three interesting things a blog tool should do…
A.L.
Well, using the link feature at google blogsearch is a good solution for crosstalk.
“Like this”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?scoring=d&hl=en&lr=lang_en&q=http://www.windsofchange.net/
Also, if you are using Firefox, there is an extension so you have this option embedded at the bottom right of the browser:
“Blogger Web Comments for Firefox”:http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/webcomments/index.html
Google is superior to Technorati in most ways except that Google misses some links that show up on Technorati. If you need to do thorough searches of blog posts you still have to use multiple search engines, and you still have to waste a lot of time plowing through repetitive and poorly categorized search results on Technorati and similar systems.
One of Technorati’s biggest failings is not its interface but simply the fact that it is often slow as compared to Google. Slow speed is a huge disincentive to use any Web service, yet time and again the people providing such services cut corners in ways that tend to bog down their systems.
Technorati’s reason to live at the moment is very simple. It lives to exit its current state through an acquisition. This is the only way the dudes and dudettes who have been slaving away there for years can hope to get any kind of a payout.
Hence, they’ve redesigned in hopes that a sharp bit of victoria’s secret swag draped around the site will cause potentials suitors to ignore the pig inside the nightgown.
Functionality has never been what the sites been about. It has, in short, never really worked well and now it works less well.
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! +1 vanderleun
The lead investors in technorati are Mobius and DFJ (Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson) who both have board seats. And recently joining them is Sanford ‘Sandy’ Robertson. If you’re in the Valley scene, that’ll tell you something, but let me spell it out a bit. He’s “a principal of Francisco Partners, one of the world’s largest technology buyout funds” and “was the founder and chairman of Robertson, Stephens & Co., a leading technology investment bank formed in 1978, and sold to BankBoston in 1998” (from the technorati management page). If you want some more, here’s an old backgrounder at Wired. You’re talking “Mr. M&A”.