Dânesh Zaki

Having heard a lot about MyToday and Taazza, I decided to check them out. They are both news aggregator sites similar to digg but with an Indian perspective.

When I visited the Taazza home page, all I was able to see was a page with a link to their blog and an e-mail address box for notification when the site is ready. But I could see blogs that had reviewed and raved about Taazza, which made me think that access to the site was available only for an elite few.

See update at the end of this post

MyToday, however, was accessible. Its UI was simple but not attractive. The main page had a two column layout with posts on the right and categories on the left. Clicking a category took me to an AJAX based page with news aggregated from various categories including (but not limited to) India News, India Blogs, World News, Technology etc Expectedly, the India category covered sites on India extensively. This site, in my opinion, would be more useful to NRIs than resident Indians as Indian news coverage abroad is average to poor.

I would have liked more coverage of Indian sites in the technology category. Techtree.com, for instance, is an Indian site that I frequent to get news and reviews on gadgets and computing paraphernalia on the Indian scene. Unfortunately, this was not present in the list of feeds.

But I thought that the concept of sharing OPML files (blog bookmarks file) was a neat idea.

What this site sorely lacked (in my opinion of course) was the ability to customize. There is no way one could mix and match news from across categories. Whether this feature is part of the next release, I do not know.

Bottomline: Maybe useful for NRIs, but without customization capabilities, not very attractive for regular use.

Update: Arjun Ram of Taazza sent me screenshots of Taazza as it is not yet open for beta. The screenshots were impressive, I liked what I saw. Taazza is a Mashup, using Google Maps innovatively to demonstrate the locations of the news displayed. Since what I saw were screenshots, I could only look at them (as opposed to playing around with the site). The one thing that I would like in the site is the use of the color green in the layout as green is synonymous with freshness (taazza).

I sent Vinu of My Today my OPML file and a couple of feeds that I thought should be added.

It is great to see innovators seeking feedback from end users, this, in my opinion, will make the sites more popular.