Derek Powazek over at Technorati just introduced Technorati Favorites, a way for you to track your favorite bloggers. Basically, it’s a “river of news” RSS reader, at least from first glance. I haven’t had too much of a chance to delve into it too deeply, but I can’t imagine a power user finding this thing useful — especially since Technorait is at LEAST five hours behind on getting new posts in there. I added Tara’s HorsePigCow as my first favorite, and the latest post showing up is from five hours ago, when in reality Tara has updated at 6:38pm according to my copy of FeedDemon.
I love Technorati dearly. For bloggers, it represents a place where you can set goals for your own traffic, see who is talking about and linking to you, find new writing inspiration in the form of hot topics, and a place to gaze longingly at the Top 100 Blogs and envision yourself being there someday. But Technorati Favorites doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose, especially given that bloggers are a smart bunch and are probably already using a dedicated RSS reader to track their favorite blogs. Or perhaps I’m wrong, and there’s some cool technology at work here with a dynamic new way of looking at things. I’m just not seeing it, if there is.
Thanks for the review and the critique!
We really didn’t design this as a replacement for your RSS reader – rather you can use this to share favorites with others, and more importantly, you can do search within your favorites – or within someone else’s favorites. So here’s a search for “blog” on Derek Powazek’s favorites:
http://technorati.com/search/blog?faves=fraying
and on mine:
http://technorati.com/search/blog?faves=dsifry
and so on.
Hope that helps clarify things!
Dave
Now Technorati has its own (incomplete) favorites
Looking to share an incomplete favorites blog list? Reading lists and favorite blogs being shared continues with Technorati Favorites.
Too bad it is only blogs though and doesn’t include RSS feeds. If you try to add an RSS feed it barks back i…
Thanks for the response, Dave. I get the idea a little better now. At first, it felt like it was trying to be an RSS reader, but as a share/social tool, it works really well!
Thx for information.