doctorvee

Am I the only person who thinks that Technorati’s “WTF” feature is absolutely terrible?

For a start, it has got the worst name ever. I’m sure it seemed like a funny joke at the time. But now it looks silly with “WTF” plastered all over Technorati. For the uninitiated, “WTF” means “What the fuck?” to the cool kids. Technorati devised an oh-so-funny backronym for its new feature: “Where’s the flame?” Uhh.

But not only has it got that awful name, but the feature itself is utterly diabolical. It is supposed to help explain why certain search terms are popular at the moment. But if you wanted to find that out, wouldn’t you just, err, search it and look it up?

Seemingly, any old person can get their terrible writing just one click away from the Technorati front page. Mostly — and this could have been predicted — it is people with bees in their bonnets.

One WTF for Facebook, which is currently in the news for its awesome Facebook Applications, is this:

Recently, Facebook made some changes – to make their site more ‘user friendly’… they even have a link “Spread the Word… Invite your friends to Facebook”…

But if Facebook still has ties to the CIA, DARPA, and Department of Defense… do you think I really wanna invite my friends?!… I’ll let them have at least SOME privacy…

Why are Google and Facebook always hiding their intentions? Why is it that when advocacy groups address their concerns on Privacy Rights… Google and Facebook ignore them? Why aren’t Google and Facebook TRANSPARENT companies like every other ETHICAL business on this PLANET?!

If Google and Facebook are really for Peace and for helping their users… why don’t they correct their ways and SHOW us that they care about our Privacy Rights?

I don’t even know what this means. It doesn’t explain anything about Facebook. It is just a badly written puff piece about privacy — but without making clear exactly what the privacy implications are meant to be. What, for instance, is the supposed link to the CIA about? Any evidence? Any explanation of what the supposed implications are meant to be? Frankly it looks like it was written by a loon.

You could say the same thing about blogs, but the point is that blogs succeed and fail under their own steam. Bad blogs simply do not get read. A bad “WTF” entry is, as I said, one click away from Technorati’s front page.

And while there is an attempt at some kind of Digg-style “wisdom of crowds” democratic moderation, nobody uses it. The WTF I quoted above is currently the second-highest WTF for Facebook, with a grand total of 2 votes. Third, also with a total of 2 votes, is a piece of spam. I think this might have something to do with the fact that WTF is useless, and voting would be a complete waste of time.

Even if you could add comments, so that you could have a discussion around the issues raised in the original ‘blurb’ posting, that would add a great deal to the feature. But then again, this sort of thing is what blogs are meant to be for. And Technorati is meant to be a blog search engine. So this feature ought to be totally redundant. My guess is that it is, and Technorati just don’t realise it.

Why can’t Technorati just concentrate on its constantly broken blog search engine, which is after all what Technorati is meant to be about? These silly features are just a distraction to both visitors and no doubt Technorati’s developers.