Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!
I've got some wonderful news, six month's hard work of our entire team has just gone out the door. http://www.technorati.com/ — We just launched a major refresh to www.technorati.com. Some of the changes are subtle, some are big …
Context & Ripple Effects
This refresh closes out a usability arc Technorati has been running since its late-2005 effort to make the site easier to use — and it lands at a delicate moment: Read/WriteWeb was openly weighing Technorati's opportunities and exit options just ten weeks ago, and the company only introduced its current Authority and Rank scoring system earlier this month.
The breadth of same-day pickup is itself notable: TechCrunch, Scobleizer, Andy Beal, Steve Rubel and Pronet Advertising all covered the launch within hours, with TechCrunch reading it as 'no longer blog-centric' and Rubel going so far as to argue blog search as a category is already dead at Google's hands.
First-order effects
- Technorati repositions from a blog-only search engine toward a broader social-media destination, putting its month-old Authority and Rank metrics at the center of the redesigned front door.
- Its core users — bloggers who display Technorati widgets and chase rank — get a rebuilt interface overnight, and their reaction across Scobleizer, Marketing Pilgrim and Micro Persuasion becomes an immediate referendum on the six months of work.
Second-order effects
- The move forces a direct competitive frame with Google's blog search rather than niche rivals, which is why commentators like Robert Scoble are asking whether Technorati can beat Google where Microsoft and Yahoo have not.
- If the redesign succeeds in broadening the audience, it strengthens Technorati's hand in exactly the acquisition-or-independence scenario Read/WriteWeb sketched in March; if it reads as me-too, the exit-option pressure tightens instead.
Third-order effects
- The pattern here — a specialist vertical search service rebuilding itself into a general social-media platform to survive against a general search giant — points toward consolidation of blog discovery into a handful of large-scale players, with independent engines needing either a defensible data asset or a buyer.
- Ranking systems like Authority become the durable currency in that consolidation: whoever's influence scores get cited by mainstream media inherits the audience even if the search box itself loses the race.
The trend: Specialist blog-search services are being pushed by Google-scale general search to either broaden into full social-media platforms or become acquisition targets, with influence-ranking metrics as their last proprietary asset.