A bunch of ths also has to do with a fundamental philosophy around running the company – there’s always a tradeoff between innovation and reliability. A lot of the work we’ve been doing over the last 6 months has been all about reliability and stability – making the systems faster, link counts update nearly instantaneously, making search more comprehensive, dealing with the growth of splogs and spings, and of course, the blogosphere continues to double every 5 months.

I’m not trying to turn this into an excuse, btw. We need to make sure that your experience is always good, always consistent, and always reliable.

Thanks for keeping us on our toes and providing me with such great feedback. As always, if there’s anything that I can do to help, or if there’s anything else you notice that looks strange, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email at dsifry AT technorati DOT com or call my cell phone – 415 846-0232.

Dave

P.S. One other thing – have you noticed that your ranking and link counts are “unstuck”? That has been one of the core fixes that we’ve been working on for the last 6 months – making those counts much more reliable and much more scalable and more quickly updated…

Your comment here is much to your credit and to the credit of the Technorati brand. Unlike my web hosting service, it’s clear that you care about these issues, which is why I included that quote for your blog post. And you’re consistent in your concern, because I’ve seen you comment like this on other blogs.

And I’ll say yet again that I can only imagine the enormity of the data you’re wresting with. Being “comprehensive” is much easier in theory than it is in practice.

If it’s any consolation, the hosting service I’m switching to suffered a power outage last week, but they made it clear to their customers that they felt their pain, and the CEO was personally fielding customer inquiries.

Technology is never infallible, and when it does get out of control, it’s the people that keep the brand alive.

you’re abosolutely right to hold us to task for technical glitches and bugs, and your point is valid and well taken. We’ve been working around the clock to make sure that the Technorati is always up, always reliable, always comprehensive, and always spam-free. That’s a hard job, but when we fail to meet those expectations, we chisel away at the level of confidence you have in us.

I can’t make the issues go away with the snap of a finger or the wave of a magic wand, but just know that we take these issues very seriously, and we’re working very very hard to make sure that we continue to keep improving, and strive for perfection even though we know that we’ll probably never reach it.

Thanks again for your post, I’m sending it around to our entire staff. We’re committed to giving you a great experience, and we’re going to keep working at the issues that you pointed out.

Dave