I wasn’t really surprised when I read Kottke’s farewell to Technorati last week. I’ve been on the edge of giving up too, but I’m still hoping that they’ll be able to turn things around. I get errors of one kind or another when trying to use Technorati more than 50% of the time I try to use their site. Unfortunately it has only been getting worse.
So when I read todays announcement about Technorati and Newsweek I was upset at first. It is great and all for Newsweek to be bringing in blog commentary on the articles, this is a big step for them. But I was ticked that Technorati, who can’t even get their site to work half of the time, is expanding their services to others instead of making the darn thing work in the first place.
Then it hit me, perhaps Technorati is getting a boat load of money to provide this service to Newsweek. I mean a lot of money, in multiple shipping containers. Hopefully this is the case, because they need some way to make their site work and I’m hoping that a metric ton of money will make that possible. Otherwise they are going to sink futher down the drain and users will move to services that don’t return a page bragging about their site being broken because they are recieving too much traffic.
UPDATE 1:05pm 25 Aug 2005: One of the reasons I’ve continued to hold on to hope with Technorati is because Dave Sifry still takes the time to respond to posts like this (see the first comment). I’m hoping that someone with that much passion for their business will find some way to make things better.