Follow on Facebook
Follow on TwitterIt’s hard to be an active blogger without being aware of Technorati, it’s a source of traffic and more importantly it’s authority ranking is a way of keeping score for bloggers and those looking to advertise on blogs.
The trouble is Technorati seems rather flaky, for several weeks now I’ve had problems pinging them with updates to this blog and the issue is still not resolved. During that time I’ve been Googling Technorati problems to try and see if it’s something I’ve been doing wrong or perhaps a problem with the latest version of Wordpress or a plugin I’m running. Instead I’ve found that Technorati ping problems are a regular occurrence for example:
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June 2007 Business Opportunities and Ideas starts having ping problems with Technorati.
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May 2007 Webstraction asks Are you PING-less in Technorati?
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March 2007 Making money on the web prays for the Technorati spider to visit his site.
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November 2006 Wordpress Support Forums on Technorati ping problems.
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September 2006 Steve’s Old News comments on Technorati ping problems.
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August 2006 eMomsAtHome asks is anyone else has had Technorati problems lately?
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February 2006 Kaushal Sheth has can’t get Technorati to ping his blog.
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January 2006 Problogger reports problems with Technorati as does The English Guy.
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June 2005 BurningBird reports ping problems with Technorati.
These are just a few that I picked out, but I was amazed to find that the problem goes back at least two years. Now if I was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Technorati I would be hugely embarrassed by this – after all responding to a ping request and the checking an RSS feed is pretty trivial software to develop (I’ve actually written software to do so myself in the past). Scaling it to support millions of bloggers does make it more complex but it’s not an insurmountable problem – Google manages to index all those blogs and billions of other websites too.
I’m not the CTO of Technorati though, instead I’m a software engineer turned Entrepreneur so I can’t help looking at this and thinking that there’s a great business opportunity here. Technorati have proven the demand for such a service, if someone comes along an builds a better version they could rapidly overtake Technorati for first place (much like Google did to the early search engines).
Perhaps several of the people that keep asking me/searching this blog for a place to invest a million dollars or a VC who understands the market for a Technorati like service would like to get in touch and we could discuss some ideas.
This post is part of my Internet business opportunities series.
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This blog is about business opportunities and ideas that I spot, think of or hear about and think are useful and interesting. It is intended to provide ideas and inspriation for you to help you find the right business idea for you to then grow it into a successful business.
I cannot understand all these problems of Technorati staff, according to Alexa stats it’s #197 site in the web. Why do they sleep when the world keeps turning ;]
But building a competitor for Technorati might be difficult as hell, without a bunch of nice ideas and a bag full of money it’s impossible, in fact.
I’m also wondering why they keep redesigning the look and feel when the fundamentals don’t yet work.
Building a competitor would take a good technical team, a fair chunk of money (millions) for the software, hardware and datacenter plus running costs until cashflow postitive so thats where a VC would be useful. However should one have the money to build it I have access to a team of some of the best software engineers in the world and some pretty good infrastructure guys too.
Getting buzz from bloggers shouldn’t be too hard just look at some of the big names (A list bloggers) that have had problems with Technorati I’m sure they’d blog about and try a new service.
Combine that with a good relationship with the likes of PayPerPost, ReviewMe and the like and you’d be adding a lot of value to the community and are likely to recieve their help in return.
[...] has written a post about building a better Technorati, I’ve taken it as a great opportunity to write another post to my MyBlogLog Ups and Downs [...]
Trechnorati is becoming completely unreliable and the company is terrible at communication. Perhaps the reason that Technorati is so complacent is because they have no competition. Google and Alexa have the capability to track block reactions, so it wouldn’t take that much for either to improve upon that, add a few more bells and whistles and give T’rati some competition.
Sharon, exactly my point there’s a market here waiting for a competent company to come in and grab it.
Hi John,
I discovered something that puts these others to shame. Each time I go to Technorati I’m logged in as someone else without even trying. That means I can access their accounts, delete/change things, including their passwords. I promise, I’m not a hacker. This is something that’s been going on for a while.
Mark,
Thanks for posting – that’s shocking! Shocking to read your post about it, has the forum thread been replied to yet?