Technorati CEO Dave Sifry admitted in a recent Wall Street Journal article (subscription may be required) that they are getting an edge from “exclusive deals in which some hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else.”

Rogers Cadenhead refers to this as that ‘F-ing Ping Thing’:

So while Technorati has derived benefit from notification services and worked with programmers developing a new system, the company has been making exclusive deals that undermine notification for everyone else.

I’ve got mixed emotions on this one. Technorati is a business and has to make money somehow. There is nothing stopping anybody from setting up their own competing service and going directly to the RSS publishers themselves. You, I, anybody reading this can go out and add a server farm and start soliciting pings and aggregating RSS feeds right now.

If I were to do that, and truth be told, I am doing that on a much, much smaller level with a couple of projects, I wouldn’t be worried about being the first in so much as being something updates fast enough and is usable. One could argue very convincingly that Technorati in its efforts to be faster than everybody has sacrificed usability.

In my mind, a good system would be one that watches the pattern of the blog publisher and checks the feed as frequently as the average posting times or when the publisher decides to ping. For example, let’s say I publish on average four posts a day and the average posting times are in the morning and late night. A smart program checking for updates would check my site for updates twice in the morning and twice in the evening or if I pinged them directly. A system could be setup to check certain feeds until the publisher starting pinging directly and then turn off the smart feed checking algorithm.

With our blogs, we ping several services ourselves and don’t always use ping aggregation services like pingomatic because I’ve noticed that some services update faster when pinged directly. Makes sense if these aggregation services (and I don’t know if pingomatic uses a cache or not) grow larger and start caching their requests. All those caches would start to add up.

I fault Technorati for slow search engine result times, not the deals they try to make to finance what is a free service for the rest of us out here. I’ve talked about ‘free’ not really being free before, so I expect deals are being made. I think they should disclose the deals and not try to be underhanded about it, and if Sifry is telling the WSJ, then that’s not exactly keeping it hush, hush. If they don’t make money somehow then they will go away. I still believe their model is to be bought out, not to be a long term service standing on its own two feet. Unfortunately for them, it doesn’t seem that the big guys are all that interested. All it is going to take to crush Technorati in its current state is one of the major players (like Google, MSN or Yahoo) to release something superior that has traction and we’ll be saying: “Remember Technorati …?”

For that matter, IceRocket is making a good run at them with not requiring tags to point to them. I’m sure Mark Cuban would love IceRocket to be the next Technorati.

For Technorati, its employees and investors sake, I hope that while they are cutting more deals to help stay afloat they really figure out their scaling woes. When their system works, it is pretty cool, but us netizens are an impatient bunch and we won’t tolerate waiting to see stuff like what is pictured at the top of this post in big black letters:

“Sorry” is right.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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