David Sifry failed

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

With the Web, it was common that the inventor of an idea failed to be the one who commercialized it. The team behind Friendster failed to build the social network that took over the world. Overture invented the idea of selling keywords for searches, but only Google turned it into a successful business. And apparently David Sifry was an early pioneer of looking for spikes in sharing:

Addendum: #David Sifry, creator of the Technorati.com, has created the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List, in part spurred by this article. The list is designed to flag people with low overall link numbers, but who have done something to merit a sharp increase in links, as a way of making the system more dynamic.

The idea of highlighting stuff that goes viral became the business model of a dozen other businesses, but Sifry was there in 2003. Apparently he failed to develop the idea.

For that matter, he failed to develop Technorati. He just walked away from it, instead of turning it into the success it should have been.

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