Technorati's "Strategic Blunder"

In this weekend's Times Union, Kristi Gustafson authored an article entitled How Facebook invaded Myspace's space, with a sub-headline "Strategic blunders" led to dominance in social networking war. It's a great read, and reminded me of another, much bigger blunder.

Once upon a time, circa 2005, Technorati was red hot: think of Google trends on crack! I would write and post an article on a popular topic, and in no time, via Technorati Tags, I'd pull in 200 or more visitors within an hour or two! Such was the power of Technorati. Those who abused the process didn't get far. Netizens knew who the spammers were, and their blogs attracted few hits. Technorati was king... until...

Two things happened. The first was a glitch, one that t'rati caught and fixed. It involved the world's #1 blogger at that time, Chinese actress Xu Jinglei. Approx. 180,000 hits a day - overlooked by t'rati! But they made it right, and in the blogosphere, all was good. But the next thing they did screwed them badly.

Whoever it was at Technorati who decided to classify MySpace pages as "blogs" was an absolute lunatic! Overnight, technorati was worthless. Lost all credibility with true bloggers! As soon as that decision was made, I never got another visitor from Technorati! (well, maybe one or two, but certainly not the hundreds I used to see in a few hours.) No matter how hot or how important a topic was, it didn't seem to register anymore on Technorati! To this day, it is extremely rare that I get a visitor who has come into my blog via Technorati.

From WikiPedia: In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which then claimed to track 27.7 million blogs, did not take into account MySpace blogs, of which she said that there were 56 million. As a result, she said that the utility of Technorati as a gauge of blog popularity was questionable. However, by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace blogs.

Well, thanks for nothing dumb ass Debi! MySpace pages were NEVER blogs in the first place!

So I bitched about it and blogged about it at the time. Nobody cared. But one thing was certain: Technorati really blew it! What were they thinking? Technorati had become, in a digital instant, something akin to that favourite old uncle who suddenly lost his marbles.

Today, most people steer clear of MySpace. I myself won't even bother going to a MySpace page. Why? They're great at choking your browser. Like Kristi's article says: They're too busy. You have to scroll up and down and sideways to see the page you're trying to read. No wonder everybody abandoned MySpace for the simple elegance of Facebook!

MySpace became the albatross around Technorati's neck. The Technorati Team is still around, but they lost their chance at being the undisputed dominant authority in the blogosphere when they embraced MySpace. I feel for them, because they used to be so damn good! Hmmmm... Perhaps there was an exchange of cash involved? Or was it all because of dumb-ass Debi? Jones happens to be one of those idiot "blog-her" bloggers... By the way, Jones' last post was in May of 2009 and she only posted 12 articles! THIS IS MY 4,366th POST!

Tags: MySpace, technorati