Friday, April 13th, 2007...2:34 am
Technorati Acquires Social Publishing Company - They Should Be Thinking Bigger
David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati has announced on his blog the acquisition of Personal Bee, a social publishing company.
This is what he has to say about them.
Personal Bee is a media collection platform that enables the each of us to curate and publish our own personal sites around topics, issues, or anything else we choose. It lets anyone (that means you) create and update collections of interesting citizen and mainstream media, publish them to a personal or public page, and start a following. I’ve been using it for a while now and let me tell you: it’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s FUN.
It sounds very similar to Where’s The Fire?. David doesn’t mention whether Personal Bee will replace WTF or if it will be a complimentary service. Personally, I think it might be best if they ditched WTF, and its ridiculous name as well.
This announcement wasn’t particularly exciting but it got me thinking about something else.
Am I the only one who thinks if Technorati offered a social networking service similar to MyBlogLog it would be absolutely massive?
Let’s look at the numbers for a moment.
- From all accounts MyBlogLog has over 100,000 members.
- Technorati has upwards of 70 million blogs on the books.
This is what Alexa has to say about them both.
Technorati has four important things going for them.
- A large established userbase.
- Loads of traffic.
- An image of legitimacy.
- Nearly every blog created ends up there.
Bloggers are self-promoting by nature, and will flock to any service that gives them another outlet to promote their blog. I don’t visit Technorati for anything other than checking my ranking, but if they were to add social networking functionality I’d be visiting much more often. If you’re a blogger, I’m guessing you would too.
Update:
I was in a rush to get to dinner so maybe I didn’t flesh out my argument enough.
If Technorati were to implement social networking features like communities, friends lists, messaging, and the like, they would instantly have a base of 70+ million blogs, with every new blog registered adding to that number. On paper their userbase would cast a big shadow over MyBlogLog and the fact that Technorati already plays a big part in the blogosphere would mean in all likelyhood the adoption rate would be quite high.
Technorati’s servers already struggle under the load of 70 million blogs so it may not even be technically feasable to implement this and the same can be said about the financial side of things. I just thought it was an interesting idea considering Technorati have been toying with social functionality, first with Where’s The Fire? and now with the purchase of Personal Bee.
Pete Cashmore over at Mashable has some interesting comments on the acquisition. He seems to think it’s a ploy to get more search engine traffic.
9 Comments
April 13th, 2007 at 4:57 am
Am I the only one who thinks if Technorati offered a social networking service similar to MyBlogLog it would be absolutely massive?
What exactly are you referring to?
April 13th, 2007 at 6:17 am
A personal bee? Is it quite similar to http://103bees.com . well, we will be expecting some buzz in technorati. Actually, I also visit Technorati to check my rankings! And it has pretty much provided me some good service, anyway!
April 13th, 2007 at 7:35 am
david: This is my reasoning - with the large userbase Technorati has, if they integrated social networking features, communities, friends, etc, similar to MyBlogLog they could pretty much own that space.
Imagine if they implemented those features, every blog registered with them, 70+ million, would immediately have its own community. And every new blog registered would add to that number. On paper their membership numbers would blow MyBlogLog out of the water, and I’m certain their traffic would increase dramatically as well.
Whether or not they want to stray that far from the original purpose of Technorati is another issue, and so is the technical and financial feasability of implementing it, but I think it’s interesting to speculate.
April 13th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Dan — Technorati is a great service and I have no doubt that if they launched a social service they would give us a run for our money. There is one flaw in your thinking though which you might want to sort out. Blogs indexed != membership. Just because they have 70 million blogs in their system doesn’t mean that they 70 million users (let alone 70 million registered users). You are off on that one by a few orders of magnitude.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Eric’s claim is much evident when you look at the most popular blog at Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/). Most of the blogs indexed as popular in Technorati is not been claimed yet. In other hand MyBlogLog has relatively good established user base who socialize already.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Eric - I didn’t mean to suggest 70 million blogs would mean an equal amount of members, only that they would convert to instant communities. Since they are already so active within the blog community I’d expect the adoption rate would be pretty high, plus whatever userbase they do have it would be large enough to make a big impact.
I don’t doubt the number of registered users would be significantly less than 70 million. In the hundreds of thousands more than likely. Still a good base to start from and one that would grow quickly in a short period of time. Have you got a ballpark figure for their membership numbers you could throw at me?
The estimate I’ve got for MyBlogLog’s registered user count is around the 120,000 - 150,000. Only you would know for sure. When you take into consideration the amount of users without blogs, duplicate accounts, non-blogs, and also inactive users I’m guessing that number would drop significantly.
Technorati would suffer as well but without giving away numbers do you think you would have a legitamate active membership greater than Technorati’s?
All I’m suggesting is if they were to implement a quality service that was robust and feature rich then they would be a large force off the bat and would grow even larger in a very short period of time. Of course if their service was terrible they would tank.
I admit the numbers are rough but this was never meant to be a deep and minutely documented thesis, just a bit of entertaining speculation.
To be clear I like MyBlogLog and I think you’ve done a remarkable job making it the success that it is. Now just put the whip to those engineers and get some new features out already.
April 14th, 2007 at 6:02 am
I think if Technorati adds social networking the first would need to clean their UI. Am I the only one who thinks the site is so cluttered and confusing?
Other than that, I think it’ll be great to see more features like “your favorite blogs”. For instance I’d like to add comments to my favorite blogs, something like a testimonial.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:40 am
dlinsin - Technorati’s navigation could definetly do with some improvement. Actually there are alot of things that need improving. Maybe I should write up a list.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:09 am
If Technorati offered a MBL-esque service, it would be rediculous! MBL is an amazing site and has done wonders for bloggers. The only issue I see is speed. I’ve never been happy about load times for Technorati - seems like they just need more servers to get up to speed - shouldn’t be that tough, though.
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