After Steve Rubel broke the news about Technorati’s new Digg-like service called Technorati WTF, Technorati first pulled the service offline, then went briefly offline, then went back online with WTF still being offline, then it was down for “scheduled maintenance”, and now it’s online again, and WTF is working. Technorati’s lack of communication with their users in this period was a bit worrying, but I guess that this was due to the fact that WTF went live before they intended to.

WTF was initially dubbed by the press as a digg-like service, but it’s actually a combination of a buzz aggregator (if you’re not sure what this means - hell, I’m not either - go see BuzzFeed in action) and digg-like voting - except you can only vote up, not down.

Any user can write a “WTF”, which is basically a currently hot topic. A WTF contains a topic, a title, and a description (with links). At the same time, it is a “blurb” on the topic. Then, other people can add “blurbs” on the same topic. But blurbs aren’t just links, like in Reddit or Digg. They’re mini-blog posts. (I didn’t get this at first, so I created a blurb which is essentially only a link). All blurbs can be voted on. And now, check this out (quote from Technorati):

“If you think that you’ve got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.”

Besides this, the blurbs with the most votes will appear at the top when you click a Technorati tag.

Frankly, it’s confusing. It took me 10 minutes to process what they’re actually trying to do here. Let’s try and think this thing through.

I’m the owner of Technorati. I want to add a social content/voting/buzz feature to the service, and I want to integrate it with existing Technorati features. What do I do?

I add a digg-like page where users submit their blog posts, which are then voted on, and which are shown on a big part of the front page of Technorati. I think it should have been that simple.

The way they did it, I’m not sure if writing WTFs and blurbs is worth it. I think that with a social content feature like this, you either go full force or you don’t go at all. I don’t think that it will create enough buzz to actually bring new users to Technorati or to make WTF a real hub for interesting content from Technorati. I hope I’m wrong, though, because Technorati seemed a little tired lately, and it can really use some fresh new features.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:26 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.