Tailrank
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
Some sections are still being researched1 / 4
Sections to complete：05
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Tailrank was a San Francisco meme-tracking startup founded by Kevin Burton (formerly of Rojo). It spidered tens of thousands of weblogs to find the most linked and discussed posts, then surfaced the hottest stories on its site, competing with Techmeme, Digg and Megite. In 2007 the company opened its backend as a platform called Spinn3r, licensing its blog index and ranking service to developers.
02 / Tailrank FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Tailrank attracted too few users, and its owner decided to stop investing in the news-aggregation site. Resources were redirected to Spinn3r, the underlying data platform, rather than continuing the consumer service.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
Tailrank was discontinued in 2009 while its parent company retained and developed the underlying Spinn3r platform.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN / AFTERMATH
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.