The news is just coming out that Technorati have lost two more employees. Tantek Celik has left after serving as 3 years as head of technology at Technorati and Adam Hertz has also left, after also serving for 3 years as the VP of Engineering. Both Tantek and Adam have played important roles in developing the technology at Technorati, with Tantek additionally being a spokesperson and evangelist of Microformats and other open standards.
From the blog post it appears that they have both left the company to pursue other opportunities. It is unknown if they are working on the same opportunity together, as they have left at the same time and worked closely together at Technorati. Having their two most important technology people leave is a big blow to Technorati. Tantek brought a lot of technical credibility to Technorati, which was especially needed as they have struggled with downtime and performance issues. Tantek was also responsible for a large part of the developer community that formed around the company and its services, and also played an important part in Technorati’s support for tags and microformats. Today you can find Technorati built into almost every blogging platform and their API being used in many different sites to display latest results, reputation and more. Technorati have had solid adoption amongst third-parties because of the level of developer evangelism and support that Tantek, along with others (such as Kevin Marks – who left for Google earlier this year) brought to the company.
It is yet to be seen what effect this will have on Technorati, as many third-party developers were loyal to the key developers at Technorati, most of who have now left the company. There were also many initiatives at Technorati, such as Microformats, that were being lead by the same key people who are no longer there. It also remains to be seen as to what will happen to those, and most importantly, if Technorati will be able to maintain their somewhat-lagging credibility with developers.
Update: It turns out that Technorati product manager Liz Dunn has also left the company, although there was no mention of it in Dave Sifry’s post. Liz has left Technorati to join Will Farrell’s Sequoia-back comedy video site FunnyOrDie as the Director of Product. Liz had been at Technorati for 18 months and was responsible for the new site they launched.
More to come on this story.