2007 / September 10^th/ Technorati assaults design (again)

I was browsing some notes today and noticed that Technorati has redesigned…. again. I’m just about speechless. Good thing I can write. This redesign is probably the worst design yet of Technorati — a feat I did not think was possible. I mean WTF (Where’s the fire, of course) Technorati. You’ve just sealed yourself as a ruined company. From innovative to… whatever the hell you are now.

It’s been known for a long time that Technorati has had some trouble with creative direction but this is just ludicrous. Did we not learn that <marquee /> was bad? Did we think that a <vertical-marquee /> would be better?

Because it’s not.

A long while ago, Technorati was seen as an innovator in an empty space — near instantaneous indexing of the world’s blogs. In an age when Google might take up to a month to index your content — Technorati had it indexed within a few minutes. They even fed off blogger’s egos and ranked them based upon the number of blogs linking to them.

But through a few burning crashes, Technorati started fixing the results — excluding good blogs because they happened to have created a Wordpress theme, or maybe just created a cool toy that everyone linked to. Soon the “democratic” ranking of the top 100 bloggers was really a hand-picked list of those blogs worthy of all-mighty Technorati’s adoration. For example, Warpspire is currently the 8th most popular blog on Technorati. But you won’t find it listed anywhere. The rank means nothing, of course — but it’s funny all the same.

In between a few hundred server crashes, and ever-slowing indexing of sites — Technorati started to fall behind technologically. Their bigger, badder, meaner, richer brother Google had started to beat them at their own game. Google BlogSearch indexes content faster, and searches better. Sometimes regular old Google herself will index content faster than Technorati. With a failing ranking system and technology architecture, they turned toward Web 2.0.

On came the drug-induced Jolly Rancher art direction coupled with awesome features named after acronyms. WTF. Where’s the fire. Hah. It sure doesn’t look anything like Digg, nope.

Soon we saw the family started to fall apart. They lost three key members within a couple of days. Soon after the whole team had nearly disintegrated and employees started smoking off in order to burn through cash at a slower rate.

And now we’re here. It’s like watching a zephyr slowly burn and crash to the ground while the pilots throw bottles of rum at the fire to slow it’s pace.

WTF Technorati.

1. 

   Don

   September 11^th | #

   Identity crisis. It happens especially when a company has lost its marbles.

2. 

   Chris Harrison

   September 11^th | #

   WTF, indeed. It’s certainly not as bad what happened to the Flock website, but still. It’s definitely a step back.

3. 

   Matt Wilcox

   September 11^th | #

   I’ve never really dabbled in Technorati, but I am at least familiar with it - and you’re right, this re-design is awful.

   It smells a lot like some programmer had an idea, made the page, and some poor designer had to ’skin’ it. Because no designer on earth would come up with a page that behaves and looks like that without being forced into it. Content that moves while you’re trying to read it? Seriously?

4. 

   David Rodger

   September 11^th | #

   It makes Safari 2.0.4 crash. WTF!

5. 

   Marc Nobel

   September 12^th | #

   Technorati has lagged the past three years, and now it has become even more unnecessary! I really think they should close the site down. There are hundreds of sites doing the exact same thing, more efficiently.

6. 

   Tarellel

   September 17^th | #

   It seems to me Technorati has completely run out of innovative ideas. And now their only chance to keep up with possible competitors is to create distasteful redesigns and appear to have some sort of internal activity. What a loss to the blogging community…

7. 

   Joel

   September 18^th | #

   In an age when Google might take up to a month to index your content

   Just wondering if that’s your experience? Most of my stuff takes at most a couple of days to filter in to the google megaplex, and my blog isn’t exactly wildly read (unfortunately).

   Also, is Tantek still at Technorati?

   (on another point, can we tab index to the “Post Comment” submit input? o=))

8. 

   Chris

   September 27^th | #

   @Joel - Pretty sure he was talking about a few years back when Google didn’t have the infrastructure they do now, and getting new content indexed would take a long time. Now Google has so many spiders running around grabbing content, and server farms crunching search algorithms, it doesn’t take long at all.

9. 

   Andrew Benton

   October 18^th | #

   I agree Kyle, the early 1990’s called, and they want their marquees back. And it seems technorati went gangster on us, “Whats popping now”. Word to your mother.

10. 

    Darren Cornwell

    November 29^th | #

    I’d have to agree with your interpretation of the ‘new’ technorati. These things are always better when left well alone to carry on in the fashion they were brought in to the web. That’s the trouble with sites today, no more organic information, everyone has their price and everyone has the ability to prioritise their content based on informational value (Read That as: Money) - I love reading the little blogs, the niche markets, that where the ‘real’ info lives.

    As for the design, it’s hideous, a complete and utter teardown of a site that once held great respect and value amongst the community. Bet hey - it’s shiny, just what we need, more shiny.

11. 

    buena

    December 11^th | #

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