Competition is a curious thing: you rarely choose your competitors, and they slide in and out of shot as your strategic approaches converge, diverge and intertwine over the years. Who would have thought, for instance, that Technorati, long time leader in blog search, would see its market share eaten up by an open, mobile text messaging platform?
Yes, Google Blog Search was a harsh blow for the once prominent blog search engine, but Technorati's greater failing was to turn a blind eye when the breaking news conversation moved to a different medium: microblogging.
Once a 10-posts-a-day blogging addict, I would typically verify a tip and dig for up-to-the-minute info on Technorati. A year ago - even 6 months ago - that was the only way. And then...Twitter. This service for sharing text updates with friends proved itself a veritable rapid-transit system for breaking news, and soon it was this microcontent production house, not the blogosphere, that became the check-digit for the established blogging pro.
An example: checking up on how long Engadget and the Weblogs Inc network had been down today (just came back up: 2 hour outage approx), I pulled up Twitter search engine Summize. Tweetscan or Terraminds also suffice. I've noticed our authors doing the same. Technorati? Technorati who?
Twitter, then, didn't kill Technorati itself: rather, the issue was that Technorati thought it could fish in the same conversations pool ad infinitum, long after the breaking news conversation moved on to other venues. Obvious dot connect...Technorati buys Summize before others realize its true value. (Or, Technorati determines that conversation tracking is no longer in its DNA, and chooses a divergent path.)