In news that should come as a surprise to no one, troubled news aggregation site Tailrank is officially headed to the Deadpool, as its parent company looks to sell off its assets. The company behind the site has decided to cut its losses and to concentrate its efforts on Spinn3r, the platform used to power Tailrank that allows researchers and developers to tap into the service’s volumes of blog data. In the wake of Tailrank’s demise, Spinn3r is announcing a major upgrade today, which includes a new backend, architecture, and revamped user interface.

Tailrank launched in late 2005 as an automated news aggregator looking to compete with the likes of Techmeme and a handful of competitors. By mid-2007 it became clear that few people were actually using the site, after it took weeks before anyone noticed that its technology section had gone blank (which prompted us to question if the site should have been placed in the Deadpool). A product upgrade a few months later didn’t do much to help the site gain traction, and visitors to the site now see an error message.

But while the consumer facing portion of Tailrank is gone, its backend lives on. The company spun off the technology platform called Spinn3r in early 2007, allowing developers and researchers to tap into its blog indexing and ranking data. Since then it has been used by a number of major universities and startups as a way to access vast amounts of data without having to crawl the web themselves.

Today’s release of Spinn3r 3.0 introduces a new admin console, which is meant to make it easier for users to sift through Spinn3r data (the company reports that while it has previously provided a powerful API, some customers had trouble using it, which the new panel should help with). Other new features include access to comments through an API, improved tracking for new content across blogs (even those that don’t support pings), a much larger archive of past posts, and improved performance.

Spinn3r has also detailed some of the applications researchers are building on the platform, including a Swine Flu Tracker built by the University of North Texas.

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We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).

So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.

We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.

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That week has come and gone, as have two additional ones. No news. And today the top story on TailRank is a viagra spam post. The second headline story is a porn spam post. Below that are real stories but they’re months old. This is from the site that was “designed with spam prevention in mind.”

There’s absolutely nothing in the technology section.

Should TailRank be added to the TechCrunch DeadPool or, as Burton commented on our last post, is it at “healthiest point we’ve EVER been as a company?” You decide below.

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I emailed founder Kevin Burton late yesterday to see what the problem was. He responded “Just in the middle of a big uprade to Spinn3r which is causing more work for Tailrank. Basically a large infrastructure upgrade.” Shortly thereafter the site went live again, but all of the stories are days old. The most recent story in the Technology section is 3 days old, for example.

The fact that the technology section was down for weeks and no one seemed to notice or write about it suggests that the site isn’t being read regularly by very many people. But Burton may have a bigger problem on his hands – Tailrank is basically a showcase for the technology behind his other startup, Spinn3r, which provides blog indexing and ranking services to other sites.

If Tailrank can’t stay up to date with the news, how can partners rely on the underlying technology?

This may get itself sorted out – Burton says above and on his blog that a major upgrade is in process. But the messaging is coming only after we emailed him to see what the problem is. And however large the upgrade, it shouldn’t degrade the service for weeks at a time. This isn’t in the Deadpool yet, but it’s close.

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

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The basic idea is the same – TailRank is analyzing videos that blogs link to and embed on their sites, and then determine what videos are popular based on the aggregate weighted statistics. Bigger blogs get more weight, but smaller blogs get a vote, too.

Competition is a great thing, and these companies are competing hard. Megite even recently took a swipe at TailRank based on recent Alexa stats, here. As to video, which product is better? Well, they look about the same, although I give a slight nudge to Megite based on on the interface, which shows more videos on a page.

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The undisputed leader in this space is TechMeme, which most bloggers check multiple times per day for news. One thing I like about TailRank is that it has a simple search function, which TechMeme inexplicably ignores. That means if you are looking for yesterday’s, or last week’s, major blog news, TailRank is the place to search. I also like that Tailrank indexes 150,000 “major” blogs, whereas TechMeme only tracks the largest few thousand blogs. This is an issue that Steve Rubel and others have occasionally discussed, calling TechMeme a “Blog Country Club” with exclusive membership.

Previous TechCrunch posts mentioning TailRank are here.

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I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo.

The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users.

It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.

My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting.

The List:

1. Blogniscient
2. Blogrunner
3. Blogsnow
4. Chuquet
5. Megite
6. Memeorandum
7. Newroo (pre-launch)
8. Tailrank
9. Technorati Kitchen
10. Tinfinger (pre-launch)
11. Topix.net
12. TruthLaidBear

The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services.

And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines.

Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe.

Memeorandum has redefined how early adopters get and digest their news. While these sites are still young, they will have a disruptive impact on the big guys, soon. Tailrank (profiles), another service in this space, is also doing interesting things, like analyzing user-uploaded OPML files for additional data and including a screen shot of the post/item under discussion.

For additional information on Memeorandum see this interview with Founder Gabe Rivera.

Memeorandum and TailRank are both trying to aggregate blog and other edge content in near-real time and group content by topics/events. The result is a “newspaper for the blogosphere” that delivers breaking news to readers far ahead of traditional news services, or even Google news (the downside is that conversation swarms can occur around ultimately baseless stories).

Compare TailRank’s original interface from a post back in September to what they have now. In addition to a more usable interface, Tailrank has also started to group blog “conversations”, where different bloggers talk about similar topics, in a way I have not seen anywhere except Memeorandum to date.

Memeorandum is still better at breaking news – A headline on Memeorandum may not appear on TailRank until a day or more later – but TailRank is still much younger than Memeorandum and could catch up. And new companies like Australia-based Tinfinger (still pre-launch and sans content) and Blogniscient (profile) are gunning for this space as well.

The core back end difference between the services is that Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, hand picked the original “seed” blogs with subsequent sources discovered by his system (guaranteeing quality but sacrificing breadth), whereas most of TailRank’s content comes directly from users who upload their favorite blogs in OPML format (the file format that most RSS readers like Bloglines and Rojo use to store feeds). The additional breadth of coverage offered by TailRank may be the cause of its lag behind Memeorandum in breaking news.

My understanding is that it is a personalized search/recommendation/ranking engine for the long tail of blog content.

Kevin Burton (co-founder of Rojo), is TailRank’s founder and writes about the launch on his blog (subscribe to this blog if you haven’t).

TailRank is a next-generation weblog ranking system which takes into consideration a lot of lessons learned from other Web 2.0 products and services. Needless to say I’m really excited! I love my job and there’s a lot of innovation in this space right now.

We’re still in early alpha development mode and still building out a team. Things are going well and everyone I’ve pitched seems really excited.

I hope to have a public release in a few weeks but feel free to register for a beta account and we’ll send you out something as soon as possible. I’ll obviously be talking about TailRank a lot on my blog in the coming weeks so feel free to subscribe.

Kevin will be demo’ing the product at the TechCrunch Meetup tomorrow.