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January 31, 2007

Technorati’s Mysterious Disappearing WTF Product

Michael Arrington

48 comments »

Steve Rubel somehow came across a new Digg-like Technorati product called “WTF,” which stands for “Where’s the Fire?” It was briefly live at technorati.com/wtf, but is no longer available.

From the screen shots (see below, care of Rubel), it appears to have very similar features as Digg, where users can vote for stories they find interesting and force them higher in results.

I’ve emailed Technorati for a comment but haven’t heard back yet. This may be a product that they did not intend be available for public scrutiny quite yet, and Rubel’s post may have resulted in them removing it.

Technorati launched a TechMeme-like site called Technorati Explore in early 2006. I just checked it on a whim to see if it was still live - and it’s been removed as well. I can’t find any announcement of the product going dark, so it may have been any time in the last few months.


  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 4:09 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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Comments

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  1. Sam Davyson

    January 31st, 2007 at 4:25 am

    WTF! That’s the worst product name ever. Period.

  2. Fashion Industry Ceo

    January 31st, 2007 at 4:27 am

    I agree with Sam… :(

  3. Adam Jusko

    January 31st, 2007 at 4:34 am

    I kind of like it.

  4. TagMan

    January 31st, 2007 at 4:49 am

    WTF? Perhaps it’s a hoax??

  5. Jose

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:04 am

    I’m guessing it did get built and then someone came along and said “You named it what!!!!? WTF did you call it WTF for?” And it got pulled.

  6. fesja

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:06 am

    It’s not a hoax, it’s true. Look http://spanish.martinvarsavsky.....nglas.html (spanish)
    http://english.martinvarsavsky.....t-dld.html (english)

    It seems to be a kind of mix of Digg and Wikipedia

  7. Timothy Campbell

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:15 am

    Why is it I’m more interested in “ParisExposed.com” than “WTF”?
    It’s sort of worrying.

  8. Sreejith

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:16 am

    I think its a really thoughtful name. You know, when people hear about WTF, they say “wtf ?!” and instant publicity !! lol. And, its a different name.

    I really hate those “pro” names. I mean, I always say “why can’t they be a little more natural ?”. Now, technorati has yielded to my forsight. Anyway, read a post about this on my blog :- http://webmaster-dome.com/?p=94 .

    I’m sure Technorati wil say “wft” after the achieve rapid success.(Which they will).

  9. Matt MacQueen

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Surely Technorati must understand that most net-savvy bloggers and readers know WTF as “What the Fu*k?” and they intend to play on the double-meaning of the acronym, and while they might go to market with the santized version of “Where’s the Fire”… look at the talk value the novelty created already online. If we’re talking about it, stupid or not, it worked to grab attention. I think it’s funny.

    What remains to be seen is: are there any differentiated layers of value different than Digg has, or is it just a straight rip-off. Seems like they could figure out what intrinsic value they have in their data and expose some value or interest or visualization back about the stories that Digg couldn’t… but will they?

  10. Rajeev Vashisht

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:43 am

    This only proves that how important it is to have a payment model in place to survive in the market.

    http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

  11. heri

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:44 am

    calm down people, i am sure it s a pr thing, there is no way the final product would be called WTF

  12. snapper

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:49 am

    hey mike, read this and learn.

    http://digg.com/design/3_Reaso....._Your_Blog

  13. Adrian Keys

    January 31st, 2007 at 5:55 am

    My concern has more to do with the increasing downtime on Technorati..Last night it was that they were handling too many requests and today they are down.

  14. maique

    January 31st, 2007 at 6:01 am

    i’m not sure about them not wanting the service out just yet.
    they announced it on twitter (http://twitter.com/technorati/statuses/4760963) yesterday.

  15. engtech

    January 31st, 2007 at 6:31 am

    Steve didn’t accidently get advanced access because of Edelman, did he?

  16. Todd

    January 31st, 2007 at 6:46 am

    Technorati Explore has been down for at least two months I think. I noticed the link had been removed in late November I believe. It has been gone for awhile.

  17. milo

    January 31st, 2007 at 6:54 am

    Yesterday Rubel posted it, today it’s down, is Edelman still working with Technorati or it’s a bad trackback?

  18. Steve Rubel

    January 31st, 2007 at 6:58 am

    No advanced notice at all. I saw it on the site when I happen to be on it. Our partnership with Technorati has concluded per the original schedule.

  19. Mike Keliher

    January 31st, 2007 at 7:16 am

    I saw it, too, last night, but didn’t think anything of it. I don’t really care WTF is up with F-ing Paris Hilton anyway.

    Rubel’s right, though - why, really?

  20. Jeremy

    January 31st, 2007 at 7:25 am

    I was on technorati going through WTF last night. It is very similar to Digg. It was about 10 minutes of being on there then pages wouldn’t refresh anymore. Then I couldn’t access technoarti at all. When it finally came back up the WTF link was gone. This was about 9:15 CST last night. I’m going with it wasn’t suppose to be published live yet.

  21. Zaid

    January 31st, 2007 at 8:08 am

    Technorati is one of the saddest sites to use. They’ve the right vision but the implementation is as sucky as it can get.

    -Zaid

  22. Fred

    January 31st, 2007 at 8:32 am

    Not only is this not a hoax, it was announced publicly, and I didn’t post about it because I don’t post about products. Technorati announced it as soon as sit was live yesterday on Twitter, and apparently its gone down since. I found it tasteless not because of the name, but because the one sample “HOT” story around on launch was on Paris Hilton.

    Names aside, it just isn’t at all exciting.

  23. Fred

    January 31st, 2007 at 8:34 am

    For those still wondering about how it was announced and whether it could be a “hoax”, here’s the technorati twitter page link - the announcement is the first update at the moment:

    http://twitter.com/technorati

  24. Zaid

    January 31st, 2007 at 8:39 am

    Technorati should drop EVERYTHING and just trying to get their MOST BASIC function(search) working. You’d figure that’s a small ask but obviously for whatever reason their search has to spit out some cute error message(ie. “Let’s start over–can you please hit the “Search” button again, or reload the page?”).

    -Zaid

  25. WeezerFan

    January 31st, 2007 at 8:51 am

    Agreed with Zaid - does Technorati have a larger strategy that they are working towards? Or are they just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks? They seem to be losing direction in a Google-like fashion, but without the luxury of the cushioning billions that Big G has.

  26. Zoli Erdos

    January 31st, 2007 at 9:06 am

    Now that it’s down, it really, truly became WTF :-)

  27. Mike Rundle

    January 31st, 2007 at 9:12 am

    “Technorati should drop EVERYTHING and just trying to get their MOST BASIC function(search) working. You’d figure that’s a small ask but obviously for whatever reason their search has to spit out some cute error message(ie. “Let’s start over–can you please hit the “Search” button again, or reload the page?”).”

    I agree. That would also allow them to fire half their company and stop raising ridiculous Series J, M, Q, Y rounds of funding and actually turn into a profitable company instead of they debt-ridden abomination they are now. The horror!

  28. Todd

    January 31st, 2007 at 9:39 am

    I also think the lack of communication from Technorati about the new feature and subsequent outage is astounding. Nothing on their blog and nothing in comments. It’s on Techcrunch guys - the cat is out of the bag. Communicate with your users.

  29. Joe Duck

    January 31st, 2007 at 10:32 am

    WTF! WTF? LOL!

  30. Trott Felipe

    January 31st, 2007 at 11:47 am

    All I gotta say is WTF? Cliche!

  31. Victor

    January 31st, 2007 at 11:51 am

    What they definately need at this point is mediarati and not WTF or what is it called.

  32. DanInNYC

    January 31st, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Peter Hirshberg, Technorati’s Chairman, actually announced the WTF product Monday night at the AlwaysOn conference in NYC.

  33. engtech

    January 31st, 2007 at 3:27 pm

    I wrote a post about Technorati search around a week ago. It looks like it’s pretty trivial to get on their top 10 popular search results page.

    http://engtech.wordpress.com/2.....ent-acres/

  34. engtech

    January 31st, 2007 at 3:28 pm

    I agree with with Zaid (#23) that they need to focus on core search. Do non-bloggers use it for search at all?

  35. Michael Wales

    January 31st, 2007 at 4:47 pm

    It is now 4:45PST and Technorati WTF is back online. To be honest - I think it looks like shit. My eyes can’t quite focus on the page and I can’t discern exactly what I should be doing here…

  36. Thomas Marban

    January 31st, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    yes, it’s live now. cant’t believe they do not offer a feed.

  37. Dave

    February 1st, 2007 at 9:18 am

    Technorati has an ad up at YouTube showing WTF, using the Big Lewbowski boys in their bowling scene….
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oWWe8mzPnE

  38. Marc Danziger

    February 1st, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    If only their core product worked…there are a bunch of simple, lame problems with the site (tracking internal links in blogs, stale data, limited ways to explore the data, etc. etc.). How about a moratorium on new, kind-of-working subsites and spending six months making the core site work?

    Someone is going to go steal their lunch money if they don’t.

    Marc D

  39. Andreas Gohr

    February 2nd, 2007 at 7:07 am

    It’s officially online now. See http://technorati.com/wtf/wtf

  40. Roland

    February 2nd, 2007 at 9:49 am

    WTF? Lol, “superb” name :) with a name like that and a reputation like tchnorati have, it was a suprise that even for hours or few days a service like that was online. I think they are reavaliating the name, they must :)

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