When a technology company is fighting to stay relevant in this day and age, the quickest way to do that is to hook your cart up to the horse known as Twitter, and that is exactly what Technorati has done with its new service, Twittorati.

Blog ranking service Technorati has had numerous detractors over its history about its methodology for ranking various blogs, and the service has continued to fall out of favor around the blogosphere as people began to turn to other metrics to measure a blog’s success.  Now it appears that the company has decided to turn at least some of its attention towards the current golden child of the technology blogosphere, Twitter, in an attempt to gain back some of its previous relevancy.

Twittorati is a site that aggregates the Tweets, the nickname for the short messages users send on Twitter, of the people associated with the top 100 blogs as ranked by parent site Technorati.  The site does say that it will add “more of the Web’s most influential voices,” but there is no hint yet as to who any of those people may be.

While the service does offer one nice feature of showing you which Twitter accounts are associated with each blog, you really only need to use that once and you’re done.  Beyond that solitary feature, the whole concept of the site just seems a bit silly. When there are Twitter applications such as TweetDeck that will allow you to set up separate columns for different people you choose to follow, and then have all of those Tweets delivered to your desktop, why should you go out of your way to visit a Web site that is nothing more than an aggregated stream?  True, there is a Twittorati Twitter account that retweets what all of the Twittorati say, but wouldn’t you rather interact with the source than a stream of retweets?

The whole thing just feels a bit desperate and sad.  They have thrown more attention at some of the top bloggers and Twitter users in the hopes that the company will somehow become relevant again, but what possible use the site has beyond ego stroking of A-List bloggers is completely beyond me.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 pm under Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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