3by9

An Account Of Technorati’s Fall From Grace

Technorati in 2004 was the poster child for the RSS era (the era that soon turned into the Web 2.0 era which immediately turned into Web 3.0 and 4.0 era based on who you talk to) and their first round was about $6.5 million. Editor’s note: in 2007 dollars that’s about $57,457. Times were good for Sifry and his crew — in October of that same year they were tracking “over 4 million blogs” and things were going up. Going up big. A year later, Technorati was up to nearly 20 million blogs in their tracker. Twenty million people blogging, hundreds of millions of readers, all somehow linked to Technorati. Keep that in mind.

Design

Visually, the Technorati.com look and feel was top of its class. In Derek Powazek’s previous life he was the Senior Designer at Technorati and provided it with the look shown via these screenshots: full homepage + results page. Back in Spring 2005 this was truly a great design for such a large site and the hand-drawn illustrations gave the site a nice, human quality.

Unfortunately, their next design iteration got rid of Derek’s look and feel and replaced it with something far more generic and piecemeal, more in tune with the sub-par “Web 2.0″ designs out there already and lost all its personality. The great illustrations were taken down and replaced with a scrolling top bar and lots of orange, and among other things, the introduction of small-ass text all over the site. Personality was replaced with garish color; matching typographical choices were replaced with 4+ fonts on the same page; and tight information design was replaced with a “throw it at the wall” mentality. As someone who runs a large content site I can understand the myriad content sources available and the design challenge they pose, but after working on 9rules for a few years, I’ve learned that the firehose approach on a homepage does not work — you need to give a little and get people in the site, then give them more. Bombarding with information solves nothing and provides too many choices to the user, causing them to select none and simply leave.

The current site represents all that is wrong with information design for a large site with multiple streams of content. Instead of realizing that people come to Technorati to find interesting blog entries they assumed people came to Technorati to view a running stream of blog entries around the world — constantly updated via Ajax refreshes — which is the firehose approach. It’s too much for users to take in all at once: a dozen blog entry boxes and they’re moving! How long do they wait before moving? Do I have enough time to read any of these titles without it scrolling to a new position? What if I want to access the one that just got scrolled off the bottom? These are simple questions that Technorati failed to account for. They took usability testing off the menu and dropped in whatever fancy gadgetry they thought would draw blog entries the day of launch.

Another issue with the current Technorati design is that they paid no attention to the overall contrast of the page. Nearly all pages of their site have this image atop the right column, and it’s the brightest point on the page. Unfortunately, it’s not a link, it’s not clickable, and I’d love to see what percentage of users mistakenly click on the bright orange image thinking that it will take them to a new page. From usability tests I performed for Xerox back in college, I learned that users click on everything regardless of if it’s a link, an image, a word in an image, or whatever, they click where they look. Site designers can’t afford to put large, clickable-looking areas on the site and not drop a link on them. (Note: on 9rules homepage the leaf is big and not clickable. This was a decision I made on purpose, because normally leaves on the site bring the user back to the homepage, but on this page, I didn’t want the user to simply refresh the page and get aggravated.)

Their Largest Missed Opportunity

Most of you know how Technorati works for blog authors: you signup for a Technorati account, tell them your blog URL, then after verifying this information you have a Technorati profile to track your site around the blogosphere. There are millions of blog authors with Technorati accounts who have Technorati tracking code already embedded into their blog template. Unfortunately, I can only presume that Technorati’s business plans and niche solely involve tracking and reporting on blogs and blog growth, because if they had any foresight they would have done something with all these blog author accounts. What could Technorati have possibly done?

MyBlogLog.

Technorati had the code presence already on millions of blogs, they had a multiple-year headstart on the MBL widget’s launch, and they already had the trust of blog authors worldwide with their blog’s critical stats and data. The MBL widget’s popularity was based on author ego — the widget showed visitors on your site in a real-time avatar matrix that seemingly every blog author was obsessed with back about a year ago. Technorati tried to invade on MBL’s territory this past May, unfortunately it was a weak (and non-viral) effort that was a few months too late since the MBL widget craze peaked prior to their acquisition last Winter. Technorati lost their chance.

What should they have done? Well a social network based around blogs seems like the obvious answer, better widget integration to view other people’s blog entries in your blog sidebar, blog-to-blog messaging features, all of these are no-brainers. Instead of racking their servers to the point of meltdown with all the blogs they were indexing, they should have concentrated on the data and accounts they already had and done something valuable with it.

Instead, Technorati launches a social voting clone named WTF and has tech pundits around the country scratching their heads.

Getting Back On Track

Usually when I write one of these entries outlining everything a company does wrong, there’s a paragraph at the end that clears the clouds a bit and provides some positive words to match the negative. There won’t be any of that in this entry. Technorati’s downtime woes, visual clutter, employee exodus, huge amount of debt, and missed opportunities cannot be overcome. Their endgame is now.