March 28, 2007

TailRank Opens Service As A Platform

Michael Arrington

22 comments »

TailRank, a popular blog news organizer that competes with TechMeme and Megite, has opened up its back end and will provide the service as a platform to application developers who would like to add a blog index and ranking service. The new service is called Spinn3r and goes live at around noon today. Rumor is it already powers Gnoos, which we covered last June.

Spinn3r indexed 1 million blogs. They are charging a monthly licensing fee per thousand blogs crawled, indexed, and delivered.

  • Sphere It

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. The Blemish
  2. Tailrank Goes Blank, But Nobody Notices
  3. Ajax Girl » Blog Archive » Tailrank Goes Blank, But Nobody Notices
  4. Tailrank Goes Blank, But Nobody Notices | moraaz.org - feed all tech!
  5. Tailrank 2.5 Launches. It Still Falls Short

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. RyanBarrett

    Do you expect to see a mashup site or blog come out of this open platform service in the future? Like, niche/specialized blog searches? My basis is the Google Maps mashup blog…

  2. Kevin Burton

    The goal is to let people do whatever they want with the platform. You could build a blog search engine. Analytics package. Trend tracking. Anything you want really.

    Vertical and niche blog search engines would be very easy to implement with Spinn3r.

  3. webtech

    Just compared tailrank, megite and techmeme. Tail rank leads the pack with 113,932 unique visits. Numbers are 5,311 and 11,779 for techmeme and megite.

    I personally like the user interface and presentation of techmeme over Tailrank. We may expect to see new better apps using Tailrank statistics, just like Alexaholic(renamed to stataholic) for Alexa. But did they say you have to pay?
    You can also get the compete statistics here. I ocassionally get service unavailable error. http://snapshot.compete.com/te.....rank.com/+

  4. Kevin Burton

    Another point.

    We’re also announcing today that Tailrank is indexing more than 1M weblogs.

  5. Garth

    Why do I find so many unrelated stories in memes on tailrank?

  6. Kevin Burton

    Hey Garth.

    We’re also pending a new (and *significant*) update to Tailrank which should show of some cool stuff so stay tuned :)

    Kevin

  7. Bryant Hustle

    Kevin, Congratulation. You may want to launch your new features quick, just know that Megite launched Megite Blog Tracker and you may be interested in too.

  8. Kewtr

    The main thing with opening up is, if Spinn3r already knew what the applications would be, they could do it themselves. Now, a million minds are set loose, and who knows what will come out of it. If something great comes, so much the better for Spinn3r as more people will make use of it.

    Anyway, good luck with it.

  9. MetaTalk

    “Bryant Hustle” == Matthew Chen of Megite, spamming as usual.

  10. Kevin Burton

    Kewtr,

    Thanks… Yeah… that’s the idea. Let as many people build applications on top of Spinn3r as possible. Should be fun.

    Also… I should note. We’re trying to make the license very affordable for researchers. If you want to perform research on blogosphere data you should def contact us.

    Kevin

  11. victor

    Kevin, Can we use it to power mediarati.com as a blog search engine

  12. Kevin Burton

    Hey Victor….

    Sure.. want to take that conversation online?

    Btw…. “Bryant” …. Tailrank has had individual blog tracking for about a year.

  13. Rumble

    Looks like a pretty neat service.

    What’s with the name Spinn3r though? Just trying to be oh-so-web-2-point-oh?

  14. Ron Corbet

    It is good for Tailrank to diversify, and this seems like an ok service.

    It is good because I don’t see how there is any way that the Tech/Startup communities will switch from Techmeme to either Tailrank or Megite.

    Techmeme is brilliant in it’s simplicity - easy to read, fast-tracking, all relevant stories with no spam and no dupes. It will always be the #1 reference for this community.

  15. Kevin Burton

    Rumble….

    Spinn3r instead of spinner because the .com was taken. Plus… the 3 is because we’re 1337 not web 2.0! :)

  16. Paul Montgomery

    Good luck with it Kevin.

    Oh, am I supposed to be spamming? Okay then: Tinfinger Tinfinger Tinfinger! :P

  17. Matthew Chen

    MetaTalk, please be polite and do investigate. Don’t think everybody is like you. I am well behavioured, and don’t and never use fake names as you.