Archive for July, 2005

Technorati is dying, says the Blog Herald:

A melodramatic title to be sure, but I didn’t want to use Technorati is broken because I’ve used it before, and also I’m sad. Because Technorati is dying. It’s not the same depth of sadness you’d have for a close friend or family member, its more like losing an associate, you know, the sort of person you wave to or say Gday (sorry Hi for US readers) to on your way into work.

Obviously I agree with this. It doesn’t need to be permanent, but right now, bloggers need an alternative.

So, what are the other options?

PubSub is an obvious choice, but I fear it’s slowly decaying as well, as it isn’t spotting anywhere near the number of links that Bloglines is either. Bloglines is good in its own way, but sometimes searches come back with a “database error” (fixed upon refresh), and it isn’t really the fastest. Blogpulse is nice, accurate and fast, but it isn’t really geared towards “counting links”, which is what most bloggers want.

So, what is the real alternative to Technorati?

IceRocket.

I only discovered this service in the last few days, probably thanks to a tip from Jason (but I’m not sure).

IceRocket is like Google + Feedster + Blogpulse.

You can search, you can find up-to-the-hour links, you can trend searches and you can create RSS feeds from searches and link requests.

I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far it’s tickling me as the best of the bunch.

If you are having any degree of frustration with Technorati, I’d highly recommend you at least give IceRocket a try. It’s got an awful name, but it might just do the trick.

Doc Searls called me out on the Technorati post:

Technorati tells me Jeremy posted that item 9 hours ago. Let’s see, it’s 10:45pm Pacific Time. Jeremy’s blog says he posted it at 4:45pm. Not sure what time zone he’s in. Still, I gotta say, what lag?

For one, Technorati used to brag about posts being in the index in 7 minutes. If the time difference was nearly 60 times slower than it used to be.

There are a few points to discuss here. First is that Technorati’s index is both slow, and it’s crap. Taking a look at yesterday’s posts, Bloglines shows 4 sites linking (through 7 links). Technorati? 1.

In fact, of the top 20 results (filtering out mine, which Technorati does and Bloglines doesn’t), only shows 1 of them: Doc’s.

Of the top 50 results, Technorati only shows 3 of them.

Technorati’s index is slow. If it’s taking Technorati 5-20 hours to bring a post in (if it does at all), that is 4-19 hours slower than Bloglines. It’s inaccurate. It’s lucky if it shows 10% of the results that PubSub, Bloglines and Blogpulse show. It’s also a SLOW site. Response times of 1 minute aren’t uncommon, and even then results sometimes simply aren’t shown.

I stuck up for Technorati for quite a while (and they’re featured prominently in the book, which I now regret… hopefully I won’t by the time the book comes out). But, Technorati has had 2 years to fix it’s problems. Doc wants us to cut them some more slack, but I’ve just about run out of slack. There are other services that are faster, more detailed, more comprehensive and actually listen to bloggers’ concerns instead of making excuses.

Whether or not Technorati decides to try and make money off of this is completely besides the point.

They’ve failed the blogosphere. It’s time to own up to that, ask for help, and get people who actually know how to do this stuff in to help them out (I’d be happy to do so). Either that or it’s time to close up shop. Because going after new markets with an index which can’t be trusted is not only foolish, it reflects badly on everyone.

If they aren’t going after new markets, great. But none of the current issues (cash or index related) should come as any surprise to anyone at Technorati. They’ve been dealing with this for years.

Pick up your boots and fix the issue, or go home and remember the good times you had. You helped build the blogosphere. Most of us stood behind you for a long time thanks to that, but now that blogging’s going mainstream (and Technorati is trying to), things ultimately have to start changing. And one of those things is Technorati.

This doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road for Technorati. I hope it isn’t. But the harsh reality is that while I’m willing to help any way I can, that help doesn’t extend to using them or recommending them any longer. If they fix their issues, I’m more than happy to come back leaping and dancing and singing completely off tune (I am a drummer after all). But if they don’t… Well, we’ll always have Paris. And Monaco. Monaco was kickass ;-)

Update: It’s now been almost 2 hours since the original post, and Bloglines has this page linking to Doc’s. Technorati doesn’t.