There are a couple of places where you can go to get your fill of tech-related information and keep track of breaking news and events outside of your RSS reader or e-mail inbox. Google News isn’t one of those places (yet), but Techmeme and to a lesser degree Alltop, popurls and Digg are some of the most frequented websites when it comes to pleasing those who like to stay on top of hot tech news (us included).
Techmeme is undeniably the leader of the pack; it has solid algorithms and ranking systems in place that can quickly detect breaking news and gives you a clean overview of which other technology news sites and blogs are discussing it practically with minimal lag. It has its flaws, sure, but I dare you to show me a service that does what Techmeme is supposed to do better than they are.
The only web service that I’ve ever seen pop up of which I thought it could potentially become a real Techmeme competitor was Techfuga, a site that mimicked Techmeme in many ways but added some extra bells and whistles (like Twitter search, for example). At launch, the site garnered quite a bit of positive commentary. Louis Gray said Techfuga was the result of mating between Techmeme and Alltop, and Robert Scoble said the site was showing Techmeme how to innovate. But don’t bother going to the site right now to check if they were right. It’s been down for a few days and you won’t see it come back up again for a couple of months.
While we’re still awaiting a formal response from Techfuga founder Joao Azevedo, we gather from his latest tweets and FriendFeed chatter that he plans to rebuild the entire platform and come back with a completely overhauled Techfuga in a couple of months. It’s beyond me why the startup doesn’t just keep this version live and switch to the new one whenever it’s ready for prime time, but Joao says on FriendFeed that this is because of “set up and costs management during this development time”. Judging from its traffic estimates, I doubt a lot of people are actually going to miss it.
That said, I do hope they come back with something awesome, because I happen to think we need more competition in this space.
Back to the drawing board is the death pill for startups.
Bye bye TechFuga, your CEO is an idiot.
IMHO PopURLS is not only about tech but it’s clearly the most innovative of those listed. > popurls.net
Oh! Its sad
It could have been one of the true competitors of techmeme. Sad that it has gone down for few months now.
They won’t be back; time is everything when running websites, every idea can be copied and replicated with enough effort in a very short period of time, if they’re offline for more than a few days a new site will pop-up with better than what they already have/had. Bad move on their behalf. There’s probably more to it than just remaking of the platform.
yeah very odd why its not still up.
we recently launched http://startupticker.com in this space but we only track news from startups and not tech news sites.
No one cares, shut-up.
I didn’t click your link.
well if you are a techcrunch reader and are into the startup scene then you are missing out :p
How is the #1 article about tech start ups…
http://blog.nin...in-chicago.html
Green Parents in Chicago start a ning site… woww
true ? or for ad ?
Hrmm this is a shame. I was enjoying Techfuga as an alternative source of tech news. I hope that it’ll be back sometime..
I just went to check out Techmeme and I almost choked when the page loaded. The layout is absolutely hideous. I would die if I had to stare at that page to get the latest news. No thanks, I’ll rather stick to blogs like TechCrunch.
Sad to lost a potential competitor. Down for a couple of Months? I guess they’ve not read enough Blogs and Books on entrepreneurship. One of my favorite, from Guy Kawasaky: Don’t worry, be crappy. So folks, whatever you are doing, put it up and don’t worry about people cloning your site or Ideas, as long as you are innovating, they’ll just help you show the world how good you are.
Beta comment.
Hey, you forgot us- tFeeder: top technology news fed by RSS, ranked by Twitter.
We deliver technology news from top technology blogs (yes, including Techcrunch ) ranked by retweet count. Twitter is slowly becoming a digg competitor, and due to the realtime nature of Twitter, it surfaces interesting stories fairly quickly.
We also collect diggs and comments count for each story, and you can easily filter stories by blog, by keyword or by using search.
We also provide aggregate information based on retweets as a measure of popularity (Mashable no. 1, Techcrunch no. 2 in terms of average retweet per post).
Robin – you are the top Techcrunch writer since end of the June 2009 (our epoch) in terms of avg. retweets per post (177), even more than Michael (163)!!.
How about adding us to the list??
It’s here:
http://www.tfeeder.com/
Fail
If you had any issues loading the application, it should be OK now.
Your site looks like its been knocked up in about the same time as your post,no alexa ranking,no traffic………….Deadpool !
well, that’s not true – we’ve been up for 2 whole weeks, and counting!!
Anyway, great idea – let’s deadpool any website with no alexa rank.. I just wonder what was Twitter or Facebook alexa rank when they were two weeks old..
Your site would get far better SEO if you had those in HTML and not in flash, also most readers don’t want to look at an “Excel Sheet”… Most people want to see the first paragraph or two of an article before clicking on it.
Yossi I agree with you though just because something is new does not mean its “dead pool” like Sarah and STU seem to think, I guess they have never worked on something from scratch…
Chris – thanks for the feedback. You are right about SEO, I try to avoid flash (and GWT) as much as I can, but Google claims they are able to index content of flash files, and I hope to get backlinks that will ‘teach’ Google what tFeeder is about (technology news).
As far as the an excerpt of the story – It will be available later today (for those blogs who offer their story’s content as part of their RSS feed).
tfeeder is becoming more and more realtime, and later today hot stories will be updated every minute, so it will be really useful in identifying very hot technology stories.
I hadn’t been paying too much attention to Techfuga.com, kind of dropped off my radar a while back! I have since been solely using Techmeme and Alltop, finding that some content at SocialMedian is also pretty good!
I guess now the real-time search engines deliver pretty good tech news on their home page. My favorites are http://www.boilingpage.com and http://www.twiturly.com. Better than techmeme, IMO.
They should have kept the old site up…by taking this break they practically thrown all the press and free marketing they got so far. When the new site will be ready they’ll have to start over. 2 months in Internet time is a lot…
Keep an eye on Thy News (http://thynews.com) it should be beta launched this week. It will be similar to some of the sites mentioned in this article. Message me if you want a pre-launch preview.
Deadpool !
Oops, I should have put this…
Disclaimer: I built/own Thy News
Rather stick to blog like TechCrunch
They should have kept the old site up and running while developing the new site… I doubt it will come back to life.
techfuga was much better than techmeme IMHO.
sad that they didnt even put a note on their website – they just switched it off. what a shame!