The Lynching of Technorati

According to my RSS reader, Technorati bashing is now very much in vogue. If I am not mistaken, the spearhead of the technorati's PR nightmare among web influentials is Jason Kottke.  This isn't to say Jason is in anyway being unfair to technorati, afterall, who could disagree with his sharp assessment of technorati's problems:

While their search of the live web (the site's primary goal) has been desperately in need of a serious overhaul, Technorati has branched out into all sorts of PR-getting endeavors, including soundbiting the DNC on CNN, tags (careful, don't burn yourself on the hot buzzword), and all sorts of XML-ish stuff for developers. Which is all great, but get the fricking search working first! As Jason Fried says, better to build half a product than a half-assed product. I know it's a terrifically hard problem, but Figure. It. Out.

Indeed, that was the first thing I noticed when technorati revamped their site. They seemed to have built the site for a group of users who didn't yet exist; however, in the boardroom, they convinced themselves these users would come out of the woodwork to use their service. In the meantime, it seems their primary users were left to read "sorry, our servers are overloaded and we couldn't complete your request."

So, while I think technorati is a great company, I thnk they've become a nearly unusable service. In the meantime, I might recommend Ice Rocket to track your bloglinks. Ice Rocket appears to be as fast as google, and more accurate and timely than technorati. I'm afraid my loyality to technorati only goes so far -- as a user, I tend to use the site that works. Hopefully, technorati will be well motivated by this little disaster and create a service that seriously competes with newer services.