Paul Scrivens beats down ten Web 2.0ish companies he feels have either failed to grow, failed to catch on at all, or have simply fallen on their face in his Top 10 Web 2.0 Losers list:

Now many of these sites might not be considered Web 2.0 with regards to the technology they use, but this list was made to show the losers (and winners) in this era of the web regardless of the technologies they are using.

Two on the list that I find interesting are Technorati and Bloglines. Personally, I'm a big fan of both applications. In the case of Technorati, it may be for the reasons Scrivens describes:

"The only ones who seem to care about this blogging search engine are the site owners who wish to keep track of who is linking to them and that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s if the service is even up to allow them to do so."

But I think Technorati's real challenge is that blog readers only rarely need to access a blog search engine. Once they find a source of content they like, they're more likely to go directly to that site or subscribe through their favorite RSS reader than continually go back to Technorati. While Google or someone else will certainly enter this space, nobody has been able to do what Technorati has done to date: provide relevant search results from blogs without an overwhelming amount of spam. Google Blogsearch has been a spam disaster to date. Perhaps if Technorati was able to integrate a great RSS reader into their application, they could keep people on their site for more than the occasional search or blog ranking check? Regardless, the site's traffic continues to grow. But perhaps it's not at a fast enough rate to turn into a sustainable business model.

Bloglines is another interesting one. This has been my favorite RSS reader for around a year now, and I haven't found anything that excites me enough to move. And, unlike the lock-in some sites bring with them, I could easily move my feeds in less than five minutes to a new service if something caught my eye. I'm not sure what features Scrivens thinks Bloglines is sorely lacking, but it does what I'm looking for (at least to date) so no complaints here. However, it's unclear to me how Bloglines actually makes money, which may be enough of a problem to warrant Web 2.0 loser status after three years.