Taazza
I spent some time playing around with Taazza - a yet to launch India focussed news aggregation site. Its pretty much in alpha stage but there are quite a few interesting things that we can look forward to, which I’ll be attempting to cover here.
Taazza is built entirely on Ruby using the Rails framework. There are also some subtle Ajax implementations, which appears to be the “in thing” nowadays in Web 2.0 space. Some of the things that are inherently built into Tazzaa gives it the “fresh” look to the site. By the way, ‘Taazza’ is a word of hindi origin, meaning “fresh”. Arjun and his team are working on giving a fresh approach to viewing news online. News aggregation is pretty much getting crowded, but it will take smart approach to stand out from ones that already exist.
One of the things that I really like about Taazza is this slidebar to narrow your news stories based on time. You can view news stories as fresh as within the hour to upto 2 days - this has been thought of really well as a way to retrieve the freshest of news. Taazza also extracts the latest quotes from all the news sources based on a simple algorithm which gives you a quick run down on who’s talking what.
Taazza also does this pretty impressive integration of Google maps. When you search for a particular topic/region, it displays a list of all the news stories based on the query and also a display of the map with balloons pointing to the source(s) of that news.
So, will Taazza be the next big thing in news aggregation? Its pretty difficult to say. I viewed the site from a designers perspective and there were quite a few glitches in terms of interface design. I strongly feel that the color scheme and the logo does not really gel with the word “fresh” and that needs to be addressed. Apart from all the geek speak, it is after all the ordinary user thats gonna help gauge the popularity of the site.
April 9th, 2006 at 7:53 am
The logo font definitely looks out of place alright. They either should have something totally retro or something modern.
April 9th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I wish they would change the icons on the Google Maps with something more representative of the news item -> probably signifying how ‘hot’ the news content is.. Good job though.
April 10th, 2006 at 6:17 am
Chetan - Amen.
Rama - Thats a very good point. Arjun, take note and do something. :)
April 11th, 2006 at 2:06 am
Good feedback! Im on it. Folks can send comments out to feedback@taazza.com
April 11th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
The following website already does the news aggregation, that Taazza is trying to do.
http://www.desicrossroads.com/
April 25th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Desicrossroads has a portal feel to it.
May 7th, 2006 at 9:20 am
http://indiagram.com/
First social bookmarking site for Indian community.
June 17th, 2006 at 4:15 am
I am looking for some feedback on one of the Indian News Aggregator site that I am working on.
India47 is an agrregate of feeds from popular Indian news sites such as Times Of India, Rediff, Sify, Indian Express and others. This site is built entirely in PHP and Ajax.
Thanks,
Raj
http://India47.com
August 16th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Very nice site ….
http://www.simpledesi.com/
September 22nd, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Why do i have to subscribe to newsletter, instead of a RSS feed?
October 8th, 2006 at 6:53 am
[...] Bothack’s review on Taazza and Adle’s Taazza review. [...]