Sometimes first impressions are better than they appear on a more measured look. Technorati is down right now and was for quite a while. UPDATE: It’s back up now. Why am I writing this? I don’t remember that Google’s Blogsearch EVER having been down (I use both quite often).
Why does Google’s main search have such a strong position in my head? It’s always fast and it always is up. I can remember only two times in the past eight years when I couldn’t get Google to come back and it almost always comes back really fast.
I bet there are more than a few people trying to get to Technorati right now cause of all the new discussion about its new design and features. Yet they are getting an ugly error message.
At least when Twitter was down recently there was some humor in its error message — pictures of cats poking around inside a server with a funny headline.
Engtech says goodbye to Technorati too.
I’m sorry for getting all hyped up. Last night Technorati looked very cool and it impressed me. That first impression has been getting worse and worse all day long.
I remember how Microsoft gathered market share in the 1980s and 1990s: they just executed well enough and waited for their competitors to stumble.
I hope Technorati will be back tomorrow. I was trying to do a more in-depth review of the new Technorati.
But first on my quality checklist is “are you always up and always fast?” How about yours?
Scobleizer 
Thanks for the link, Robert.
You were one of the first to link to engtech.wordpress.com and now you’re the first to link to my new domain, internetducttape.com
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Your ending reminds me of a quote from billg:
“Features are kind of crummy in a way, because the more features you have, the bigger the manual is. And features are only beneficial if people take the time to use them, wheras speed — if you can print the pages faster, or show it on the screen faster, or recalc it faster — that’s worth an incredible amount. If you can give the users a few simple commands and make the program efficient enough to do what they want with those few commands, then you’re much better off. One sign of very good programs is that even internally they follow that philosophy of simplicity. If they want to do something complex, they call the code with simple operations internally, rather than doing the complex operation from scratch.” Bill Gates, P78, Programmers at Work
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Thanks for the link, Robert.
You were one of the first to link to engtech.wordpress.com and now you’re the first to link to my new domain, internetducttape.com
—
Your ending reminds me of a quote from billg:
“Features are kind of crummy in a way, because the more features you have, the bigger the manual is. And features are only beneficial if people take the time to use them, wheras speed — if you can print the pages faster, or show it on the screen faster, or recalc it faster — that’s worth an incredible amount. If you can give the users a few simple commands and make the program efficient enough to do what they want with those few commands, then you’re much better off. One sign of very good programs is that even internally they follow that philosophy of simplicity. If they want to do something complex, they call the code with simple operations internally, rather than doing the complex operation from scratch.” Bill Gates, P78, Programmers at Work
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I used to tell follks that Technorati was well ahead on the back strech going into the third turn. Unfortunately for David, Google Blog Search is up by 6 lengths heading for the post.
Too much time was spent on the UI and not enough on the core technology and server environment. What was worth a lot a year plus ago is going to worth very, very little soon.
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I used to tell follks that Technorati was well ahead on the back strech going into the third turn. Unfortunately for David, Google Blog Search is up by 6 lengths heading for the post.
Too much time was spent on the UI and not enough on the core technology and server environment. What was worth a lot a year plus ago is going to worth very, very little soon.
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At some point you have to wonder if jumping all over X website is really helping them or hurting them. No website can be perfect rolling out new features, even if they have a nice development environment before they switch it over to production.
These snap 15 minute judgements do not help anyone I think. I had subdomains not working on our own social networking site for months now since I moved it back to our office suite. Did that mean I was never going to fix the issue? No. It just took a while because I had a lot to do on the business front.
The blogosphere may be instant information, but programming is far from an instantly perfect science.
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This is a text-book failed redesign. Things are slow, hard to find, and broken, in ways that compound problems.
For example, nearly my entire webcomic disappeared from Technorati with the redesign, so I figured I try to reping manually. So I went to the Technorati Tools page here. See those big buttons with the pictures? They don’t work! None of them work! See that little gray menu strip? You have to click that to get to the right pages. It took me ten minutes to figure that out because I never noticed the little gray menu strip.
It’s so bad it’s embarrassing.
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This is a text-book failed redesign. Things are slow, hard to find, and broken, in ways that compound problems.
For example, nearly my entire webcomic disappeared from Technorati with the redesign, so I figured I try to reping manually. So I went to the Technorati Tools page here. See those big buttons with the pictures? They don’t work! None of them work! See that little gray menu strip? You have to click that to get to the right pages. It took me ten minutes to figure that out because I never noticed the little gray menu strip.
It’s so bad it’s embarrassing.
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At some point you have to wonder if jumping all over X website is really helping them or hurting them. No website can be perfect rolling out new features, even if they have a nice development environment before they switch it over to production.
These snap 15 minute judgements do not help anyone I think. I had subdomains not working on our own social networking site for months now since I moved it back to our office suite. Did that mean I was never going to fix the issue? No. It just took a while because I had a lot to do on the business front.
The blogosphere may be instant information, but programming is far from an instantly perfect science.
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You’re right – I get sooooo pissed off when I try to execute a technorati search and it fails. I could’ve already completed a Google blog search, but I wouldn’t be able to sort by authority rank.
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You’re right – I get sooooo pissed off when I try to execute a technorati search and it fails. I could’ve already completed a Google blog search, but I wouldn’t be able to sort by authority rank.
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We have used technorati for years now. However, the new re-design is featuring the same first page of search results, over and over, every time one tries to page through the rest of the results screens.
Disappointing. It also appears that the engine hasn’t updated since the changeover – which is absolutely fatal in the real time web.
This however might explain why Scoble’s initial results were so much more positive than those flowing in the hours after.
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We have used technorati for years now. However, the new re-design is featuring the same first page of search results, over and over, every time one tries to page through the rest of the results screens.
Disappointing. It also appears that the engine hasn’t updated since the changeover – which is absolutely fatal in the real time web.
This however might explain why Scoble’s initial results were so much more positive than those flowing in the hours after.
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I remember on SiteSpaces when I tried to replace the textarea bulletin entry box with a WYSIWYG editor. When people saw it and found out that they had to push a single button more to enter HTML, they flipped out and 200+ left the website and vowed never to return.
People are like that. When you have something people visit every day, and they are used to it. No matter how bad or ugly it is, you MUST keep it the same.
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I remember on SiteSpaces when I tried to replace the textarea bulletin entry box with a WYSIWYG editor. When people saw it and found out that they had to push a single button more to enter HTML, they flipped out and 200+ left the website and vowed never to return.
People are like that. When you have something people visit every day, and they are used to it. No matter how bad or ugly it is, you MUST keep it the same.
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No matter how bad or ugly it is, you MUST keep it the same.
Better would be to allow people to do both. Provide an option for a WYSIWYG editor for people, but have all current users default to whatever the old style was.
I don’t think things need to be static. One of the nice things about the web is that you can deploy improvements as things are improved. We just have to do it in a way that’s not disruptive to current users (eg the Yahoo Mail AJAX-heavy “beta” that’s deployed side by side with the original Yahoo Mail).
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No matter how bad or ugly it is, you MUST keep it the same.
Better would be to allow people to do both. Provide an option for a WYSIWYG editor for people, but have all current users default to whatever the old style was.
I don’t think things need to be static. One of the nice things about the web is that you can deploy improvements as things are improved. We just have to do it in a way that’s not disruptive to current users (eg the Yahoo Mail AJAX-heavy “beta” that’s deployed side by side with the original Yahoo Mail).
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Just a few minutes ago I noticed a new XBOX360 Demo available at the Marketplace, Project Sylpheed from Square Enix. None of my usual feeds had anything about it.
So I used both Google Blog Search and Technorati to find any other posts on this.
Google found one only after 2 minutes of being posted! Technorati had no results, at least for around 10 more minutes.
Technorati:
http://technorati.com/posts/tag/sylpheed+demo+marketplace
Google Blog Search:
http://www.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=Sylpheed+demo+marketplace&btnG=Search+Blogs
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Just a few minutes ago I noticed a new XBOX360 Demo available at the Marketplace, Project Sylpheed from Square Enix. None of my usual feeds had anything about it.
So I used both Google Blog Search and Technorati to find any other posts on this.
Google found one only after 2 minutes of being posted! Technorati had no results, at least for around 10 more minutes.
Technorati:
http://technorati.com/posts/tag/sylpheed+demo+marketplace
Google Blog Search:
http://www.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=Sylpheed+demo+marketplace&btnG=Search+Blogs
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