Rick Segal comments on the dissatisfaction with Technorati:
Technorati is a great poster child for what’s happening with “free” becoming the norm and people’s reactions to it. Over the air TV, like watching ABC with your rabbit ears is free. If you think a program stinks, you don’t think ah, whatever, it was free. Nope, you complain. Your time was wasted, you had to sit through commercials, whatever, but you bitch about it and feel totally fine doing the complaining.
In reading all the complaints about Technorati, I’m struck by the fact the people doing the complaining, complain with the zeal of somebody who paid for it or otherwise has an expectation of service/delivery that is, in my view, somewhat disproportionate to “free.” I understand all reactions people are going to have to that remark, I really do.
I think Rick has a valid point. A “free” service is free for you, the consumer. But it’s never free for the service provider. Someone is putting resources into making it. It may be spending a few minutes a day blogging, the sum cost of running a personal blog on Blogger. It may be spending millions of dollars on equipment and bandwidth to support a large customer base, not to mention salaries for developers who build the features, and management who gets the funding. At the end, someone is paying for rent.
The feeling of entitlement to free stuff sometimes goes too far.
But, there’s the other side of the coin. And let me take Rick’s example of ABC. It’s free content for me, a lot of money for ABC to produce and deliver it. But how free is free?
You need to license spectrum, you need to have towers sending signals over the airwaves. And somehow that puts a limit on how many public TV networks you have. A lock. So if someone comes up with really good content, far more interesting than ABC, good for them. But they just can’t get a public TV network setup overnight to deliver it to me. ABC, NBC, CBS and their likes have a lock on the airwaves.
It’s free, but it’s also limited options. There needs to be give and take. The service provider is responsible to invest wisely in the resources thay have a lock on, to the benefit of their customers.
So far for public TV, but what about Technorati? Technorati is the sort of service that Google or Yahoo can displace tomorrow (or buy and fix), if they only wanted to. Technorati is also the sort of service that any entrepreneur with a good technical team can displace. But not as easily. And there’s the rub.
You see, to get something like that up and running, you need money. It all goes back to the cost of hardware and bandwidth that are not free, development that’s also generally not free. You need investors. But what would the investor pitch be like:
“Mr Investor. Technorati has been in this business for a while, we’re going to start in a few months, so yes, they have the mind share. And we’re going to do the exact same thing, only we’ll have faster response to updates and better coverage of the blogsphere. Yes, it’s just a matter of better code, and Technorati could do that if they wanted to. Yes, there’s a risk that if they do, we have no advantage.”
Not exactly the kind of pitch that makes investors reach for their pockets.
At the end of the day, it may be a free-for-me service, but it’s also limiting my options. There is a responsibility on the service provider, to use the power given to them by the community and do something to serve that community in return.
