"ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS..."
Blog and tag search pioneer Technorati introduced what is likely it's biggest and most "Web 2.0" new feature today with something called "Technorati Favorites". As David Sifry, the founder and CEO explains it:
"The blogosphere doubles every five months. As I'm writing this, Technorati is tracking 28.4 million blogs. That's a whole lot of voices. Here at Technorati, we want to make the world of weblogs accessible, searchable, and fun for everyone to explore. Today we're taking another step in that direction with a brand new feature: Technorati Favorites.
It's really very simple. Just tell us who your favorite bloggers are and you'll get a custom page that lets you monitor, search, and share your Favorites!
Can't wait? Go give it a try! For the curious, read on for more details.
We've made it as easy as possible to add blogs to your Favorites. All over Technorati, just click the star icon (
) to add that blog to your favorites. Looking for good blogs on a certain topic? Check out Blog Finder and add blogs from there!
There's also a bookmarklet you can take with you, so you can add to your favorites wherever you browse (get it on the Favorites Help page). And if you use another subscription tool or service, you can export your subscriptions and import them using the Favorites Importer!"
By the way, the post introducing the new feature is concise, clear, and comprehensive, which in itself is an accomplishment given the ins and outs of the new feature.
I've been playing around with it a bit this morning, and have even added it to my blog (see upper right column, third down).
It's an inventive remake of a traditional feed reader like a Bloglines, but for the limit of 50 blogs (Dave, PLEASE remove this limit).
It's also a cool way to get bloggers to re-do their traditional Blog-rolls, and make them MUCH MORE fluid, and sharable. And hopefully allow them to be updated much more frequently. Traditional blog-rolls have a tendency to be ossified over time.
The user-interface is a bit confusing at first, until you realize that the "Favorites" section is in the Grey area to the bottom right. I'm still not sure what all the text on the main page of my favorites is...I think they're recent posts from the favorite blogs, but I'm not sure.
One enhancement I'd request (in addition to removing the 50 blog limit), is the ability to add a favorite to my favorites list easily from someone else's favorite list. i.e., something like a "+" button next to each of the favorites on someone else's list, that I could quickly click on, thus adding it to my favorites list with out a second thought or action.
Finally, the features affords Technorati to create a much more dynamic version of the "Technorati 100" list. In fact, I'd suggest creating a whole separate list and calling it something utterly different like "Technorati's 100 Faves", which makes sense given that the methodologies to derive this list is VERY different from the old Technorati 100 list. This new list would be far more dynamic, constantly changing, visible and sharable than the old Technorati 100 list. And that'd be yet another "free" marketing opportunity for Technorati.
Other than these wrinkles, this is a pretty powerful feature. For Technorati though, it's potentially much more than another feature.
It has the potential to be a game-changing factor for it's business model and it's core value proposition to mainstream users. Very powerful stuff if developed and marketed right.
Today's Technorati Faves are a great first step, but more tweaks are needed.
Do try it out yourself.
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