OakLeaf Systems: Technorati Troubles Continue

Friday, September 19, 2008

Technorati Troubles Continue

Update 9/19/2008 12:0024 noon: ALL~~Most of~~ my tag feeds are now working:

~~This wasn’t:~~

~~http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/ADO.NET+Data+Services~~

Some tag feeds didn’t come back until I replaced encoded spaces (%20) with + or removed query string extensions added by Technorati. The tags with spaces and query strings had worked previously.

End Update

Rob Diana’s Technorati: How the Mighty Have Fallen Mashable post of 9/15/2008 begins with this observation:

Late last week, Technorati was down for over 12 hours. I checked Friendfeed and Twitter, and there was barely a mention of it. I was surprised that Technorati being down garnered so little conversation. It seemed like Technorati went down, and nobody cared. The most recent blog entry only mentions an outage from the previous week, but the Technorati Twitter account does mention “A major bout with bots.”

One reason that Rob didn’t see much Twitter activity regarding the outage was too narrow a search term (technorati+down). A wider search on technorati alone would have uncovered my 15 tweets about the various problems I’ve been having with Technorati’s services over the past few weeks, to wit:

Technorati stopped indexing my posts
Technorati didn’t recognize my manual pings
Technical service didn’t respond to my inquiries
Eventually Technorati started indexing some of my posts
Those posts that were indexed weren’t included in all tag pages specified
RSS feeds for tag pages have been down since about 8/25/2008

Yesterday (Monday 9/15/2008), Technorati wrote the following on Twitter:

After our outage last week, we had to turn off Technorati Feeds and API. These will be coming online again on Monday. Sorry.

Yesterday was Monday, today is Tuesday, and tag feeds are still down. I’m surprised that no one but me appears to have blogged about that missing feature.

Rob asks:

When did people stop caring about Technorati? Is it the lack of new features? Or, is the decline just due to the fact that people do not care about what it offers any more? I find the lack of interest to be odd. Bloggers live by the numbers. They spend plenty of time checking the daily traffic statistics and subscriber levels. Technorati authority used to be one of the statistics that was checked often. So, what happened? The problem is that nothing happened.

And concludes that Technorati has stagnated at about 2.7 million unique visitors per month for the past year.

Instead of serving their blogger constituency, Technorati has made dubious acquisitions, such as Personal Bee and Blogcritics. Truly, nothing has or is happening at Technorati.

Following are links to my recent complaints about Technorati operations and customer service: