If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Stephen Baker of Business Week, who writes for business week blogs. In what I think to be ridiculous predictions he discusses the eventual purchase of Technorati. Although Baker thinks it will be Microsoft who makes the purchase.

“I’ll stick with Microsoft, just to be show that I don’t drift with the tide”, he says. First of all you are not drifting with the tide, you are helping to create it by media-izing the web service industry. The analysis backing such findings is mediocre at best.

Consider, for instance, that Technorati is essentially a search engine. Why would Google and Yahoo purchase them? They are search engines and that’s how they made their names. What would customers think if they went out and purchased search technology? Microsoft’s MSN may be interested in adding search services, but I don’t think Gates & Co at 1 Microsoft Way want to get into that area of the industry. But I don’t think they should either since they’ve found new focus in digital enertainment to go along with OS/Server/Office cash cows. Microsoft does not need blog search. Regardless Technorati as a search service is bad. Results have no relevance. A search for technorati on this site would reveal twenty-five posts with “Technorati Tags: xxxxx” in the text. It would not bring up this post first which is clearly about Technorati.

Well, you may ask, what about Technorati’s other functions, like tagging content? I think tagging is good for a lot of things, such as photo storage, document storage, bookmarks, etc. But why tagging blogs? Sure it’s a handy categorization method but it really does not create much value in the end.

Technorati: Yahoo or Microsoft?: “Speculation is percolating that Yahoo will snap up Technorati. Michael Arrington points to Yahoo’s purchases of Flickr and Del.icio.us.” These were good purchases because Flickr and Del.icio.us are valuable to their users and expands Yahoo’s business as a web service provider.

To summarize, Technorati will not get purchased. At least I think that GYM should not attempt the purchase if they want to maintain focus on their business model. They also don’t need the technology that Technorati provides. These companies also don’t need the user base, because for the most part it’s the same user base but Technorati is a secondary tool. I may be wrong, but I do not think Technorati is anything special.

“Arrington points to a print article in Red Herring that lists 37 signals that Technorati, as well as MeasureMap, Digg, YouTube, could be in the mix this year.”

37Signals won’t sell. MeasureMap is a stats application for blogs and should not be considered. Digg is a mediocre social news aggregator and is of no need to the big three. YouTube, on the other hand I think could be a valuable purchase by Yahoo!.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Get GetANewBrowser delivered to your inbox