TailRank Enters TechCrunch Teeth

If you’re the founder of a floundering web 2.0 company and you decide to call out TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington for “complete journalistic incompetence” for calling out your company for its flounderingness, you probably should be really really sure that your company isn’t actually floundering, let alone circling the drain of ye olde dead pool.

In this case we’re talking about TailRank and its founder Kevin Burton, both of whom got absolutely reamed on TechCrunch yesterday for failing to do much of anything to back up Burton’s earlier assertions that TailRank was healthier than ever. And off-the-charts wailing and demands for apologies and retractions usually doesn’t do a lot to help either.

Having spam and porn as your “top news” and months old or nonexistent (in the case of Technology) stories elsewhere does not a tracking “the hottest news in the blogosphere” superstar web platform make. TailRank’s plight is obvious, and Burton would have done himself a great deal of good, for what it’s worth, to acknowledge this immediately.

I was a semi-regular user of TailRank once upon a time, probably over a year ago now. The problem from the beginning was that other sites (Techmeme, Digg, Reddit) did a better job of tracking and aggregating web stories and TailRank never found the right space between them with the right set off tools to gain some buzz, audience, and market share. At some point, TailRank removed the ability for users to submit their own stories to its system, and that’s around the time I stopped visiting.

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5 Responses to “TailRank Enters TechCrunch Teeth”

  1. Kevin Burton Says:
    July 29th, 2007 at 11:59 pm

    Interesting that you’re making a lot of uninformed decisions about Tailrank based on a story that was uninformed to begin with.

    The rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated.

  2. Eric Berlin Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 12:15 am

    Thanks for stopping by, Kevin. I’m not sure what “uninformed decisions” you’re talking about. At the time I wrote this post, TailRank did look very ghost town-y and reflected Arrington’s coverage.

    To be fair, I stopped by a few days ago and saw a fresh stream of stories pumping through all of the top level pages, so that’s a good sign!

  3. Eric Berlin Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 12:15 am

    Thanks for stopping by, Kevin. I’m not sure what “uninformed decisions” you’re talking about. At the time I wrote this post, TailRank did look very ghost town-y and reflected Arrington’s coverage.

    To be fair, I stopped by TailRank a few days ago and saw a fresh stream of stories pumping through all of the top level pages, so that’s a good sign!

  4. Kevin Burton Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 12:22 am

    There were a few issues here. One was that we DID get hit with a REALLY bad spam attack. We’re actually a bit impressed by the attack as it was as innovative as it was evil. We’re going to blog more about it this week but the first round of details are here:

    http://blog.spinn3r.com/2007/07/post-mortem-of-.html

    The “ghost town problem” was a result of a MySQL bug that kept silently biting us.

    http://feedblog.org/2007/07/23/bad-mysql-replication-bug-on-4121/

    Which is fixed now :)

    None of these issues really reflect any internal economic problems at Tailrank. We’re actually looking to hire a Director of Operations and are working on some more features for the next generation of Tailrank and Spinn3r.

    I should also note that we’re having a great time. Tailrank is the best company I’ve ever worked for and up until getting kicked in the teeth by Techcrunch we were really really really happy :)

    Kevin

  5. Eric Berlin Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 12:57 am

    I’m glad to learn of all of this Kevin. I’m a fan of TailRank and think that there’s enormous potential for smart trackers of blogospheric conversations :-)

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