5 Reasons Why Feedster and Technorati will Die
What's the future of Technorati and Feedster?
It's pretty clear, I think: Today Microsoft announced that they are supporting RSS search. (via Scripting News) The future of Technorati and Feedster is a discount acquisition by one of the portals, maybe at the end of this year. Nothing to see here, folks.
Let me list the reasons I think this:
First, their business model is ad supported. Yahoo and Google have lots of advertisers that pay for those ads, Technorati and Feedster simply plug in as distribution. Follow the money.
Second, the technology is not significantly different than traditional search. Google News already supports by-the-minute updating of their index, and parsing RSS is a cinch. When it comes to deducing the most important news of the day, based on link structure, search engines already have incredible expertise on that.
Third, their function puts them straight on the traintracks of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft - Sites like Technorati/Feedster connect people with information, except the information is on blogs and pages. Google's already proven they are interested in all sorts of non-traditional avenues for information - think Orkut and Blogger.
Fourth, there isn't a first-mover, platform-like advtantage. I see Technorati desperately trying to open up APIs to build a platform, but I didn't download any of the add-on tools, and I don't think you did either. And if Google decides to support RSS search and opens up their own APIs, you think those add-on tools won't be immediately ported over?
Fifth, (and this point will be a long one) Feedster and Technorati have, fundamentally, the wrong UI paradigm. For all of you that haven't read the Marissa Mayer (of Google) interview, read it here. When discussing the process of translating the clean Google interface from service to service:
Like the Google news search [which just launched], news as a medium is different from search. We can't have a news home page that's so sparse that it doesn't have the news on it. We can't just have a search form, and ask users to guess the news.
When I read that a couple weeks ago, I started thinking: If you go to eBay, Craiglist, and Google News you'll see something in common. Some people look at those pages and think "aaah!!! cluttered!!!" If you are one of these people, think about this carefully: If your service is very "time-centric," with items that will soon expire or become irrelevant, then it's important to push those to the user. As Marissa says, we can't ask users to guess the news. We can't ask people to guess what people are listing. So the question is, why does Technorati and Feedster make people guess what people are talking about in the blogosphere? IMHO, an interface like Findory or Google News is probaby the right way to go, to show what's happening in the world.
To me, this last point is an important one, because I go to del.icio.us every day, as well as DayPop Top, as well as blogs in general, which also "push" diverse news to me. I do all of these every day, whereas I only use Feedster when I want to track a particular topic (like BitTorrent). To get lots of stickiness and pageviews, something tells me they want to focus more on the first use case. That's the reason I don't go to Feedster every day - because I want to browse, not search. That makes all the difference.
I want both sites to prosper, but I just don't think it will happen. Hopefully I'm be wrong.
It's pretty clear, I think: Today Microsoft announced that they are supporting RSS search. (via Scripting News) The future of Technorati and Feedster is a discount acquisition by one of the portals, maybe at the end of this year. Nothing to see here, folks.
Let me list the reasons I think this:
First, their business model is ad supported. Yahoo and Google have lots of advertisers that pay for those ads, Technorati and Feedster simply plug in as distribution. Follow the money.
Second, the technology is not significantly different than traditional search. Google News already supports by-the-minute updating of their index, and parsing RSS is a cinch. When it comes to deducing the most important news of the day, based on link structure, search engines already have incredible expertise on that.
Third, their function puts them straight on the traintracks of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft - Sites like Technorati/Feedster connect people with information, except the information is on blogs and pages. Google's already proven they are interested in all sorts of non-traditional avenues for information - think Orkut and Blogger.
Fourth, there isn't a first-mover, platform-like advtantage. I see Technorati desperately trying to open up APIs to build a platform, but I didn't download any of the add-on tools, and I don't think you did either. And if Google decides to support RSS search and opens up their own APIs, you think those add-on tools won't be immediately ported over?
Fifth, (and this point will be a long one) Feedster and Technorati have, fundamentally, the wrong UI paradigm. For all of you that haven't read the Marissa Mayer (of Google) interview, read it here. When discussing the process of translating the clean Google interface from service to service:
Like the Google news search [which just launched], news as a medium is different from search. We can't have a news home page that's so sparse that it doesn't have the news on it. We can't just have a search form, and ask users to guess the news.
When I read that a couple weeks ago, I started thinking: If you go to eBay, Craiglist, and Google News you'll see something in common. Some people look at those pages and think "aaah!!! cluttered!!!" If you are one of these people, think about this carefully: If your service is very "time-centric," with items that will soon expire or become irrelevant, then it's important to push those to the user. As Marissa says, we can't ask users to guess the news. We can't ask people to guess what people are listing. So the question is, why does Technorati and Feedster make people guess what people are talking about in the blogosphere? IMHO, an interface like Findory or Google News is probaby the right way to go, to show what's happening in the world.
To me, this last point is an important one, because I go to del.icio.us every day, as well as DayPop Top, as well as blogs in general, which also "push" diverse news to me. I do all of these every day, whereas I only use Feedster when I want to track a particular topic (like BitTorrent). To get lots of stickiness and pageviews, something tells me they want to focus more on the first use case. That's the reason I don't go to Feedster every day - because I want to browse, not search. That makes all the difference.
I want both sites to prosper, but I just don't think it will happen. Hopefully I'm be wrong.
posted by Arcadia at
9:51 AM
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