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Taazza - contextual aggregation meme tracker

February 8, 2007 · Posted in Default

A few days ago, Yahoo announced city-specific mashups for Bangalore and Delhi. It left me totally unimpressed. With the muscle of Yahoo, I would have expected way much more.
Enter Taazza into the picture. Taazza’s got rave reviews from everywhere - BarCampChennai, Indian blogosphere and the just concluded Proto event. I recently got a chance to take Taazza for a test drive. And boy, they have the potential to make Yahoo OurCity bite the dust.

Conceptually, Taazza is along the same lines as Yahoo! OurCity mashup. Once you login, you have the option to select from a number of cities. When you select the specific city (say Mumbai), you are presented with news, photos (from Flickr), videos (from YouTube), events (from Upcoming), blogs (from Technorati) specific to Mumbai. Essentially, contextual aggregation (context of the selected city) drawing content from various sources. When the content from all these sources is brought together in a relevant context, it adds a meaningful dimension to the data. They also have a great feature of aggregating news by recent newsmakers. Let me explain what I mean - Lets say Sanjay Dutt is all over the news about getting hist bail extended. Taazza provides you the option of seeing all the news articles related to the newsmaker (Sanjay Dutt in this case). You can also alter the time window to include older news in the results.

Well, its not just the idea that makes Taazza so amazing. The execution and specifically the design are very refreshing (screenshots below). The design, effective use of AJAX make the end user experience very pleasing. Each feature seems to have been thought out pretty well. The UI make it stand way apart from the run of the mill news sites. Taazza is one of the best Indian startups in terms of implementation and design that I’ve come across. It remains to be seen if the idea clicks with the Indian audience and whether Taazza, as a business, is successful.

I do have a few suggestions for team Taazza:

1) Relying on too many external sources for the content may affect the response time of Taazza itself. So, the QoS will be dependent on the response times from Flickr, YouTube, Upcoming, Technorati etc. I’ve already discussed this issue with Arjun Ram, Taazza’s founder and they’re working on resolving these issues.

2) Provide the ability for users to comment on the news stories. This will generate original content for Taazza and propel audience participation

3) As an end user, I personally do not see the benefit of viewing Mumbai related photos from Flickr or Mumbai related videos. The only purpose they solve are as eye-candy. Add classifieds / local business information (leverage Burrp - they have a lot of listings already) and you can probably also make money from the ’sponsored/featured’ local businesses.

4) Launch soon !!!

I’m in awe of Taazza and the team Taazza for all the work they put into their baby.

The best way I could think of describing Taazza is - “Web2.0 personified”.

After all, Web 2.0 is all about open APIs, communities, disparate content sources, pleasant user experience etc. And Taazza personifies each of those aspects of Web 2.0. I am confident that if team Taazza keep steering it to the right direction, it can be a huge success. Good luck to Arjun and Arun for their endeavors.

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4 Responses to “Taazza - contextual aggregation meme tracker”

Arjun Ram on February 8th, 2007 6:48 pm

Hi Pranav, Thanks a lot for the detailed review. A couple of corrections:
While we certainly have features that are similar to Yahoo’s our city, we consider ourselves as next generation news service.

We track you track news, slicing it by a metro (distinction between city and metro, yahoo doesnt support metros) is just one feature.

We are working hard to resolve the issues that you have brought up. Already working on versions that would integrate with local business. We have an active beta community(like you) and we are addressing issues brought up by them. Launch is coming soon!

Please keep playing around with the product, cuz there a few changes around the corner
admin on February 8th, 2007 7:07 pm

Arjun,

Thnx for the clarification. I guess, this distinction (next generation news service) isnt easy to make. If news is the main focus then the modules on the right (photos,videos etc.) distract the focus a bit from the news. With this eye-candy, it gives more of a lite-portalish feel.

None the less man, great job. Let me know if you’re available for hire for design / dev
Arjun Ram on February 8th, 2007 7:53 pm

The section on the right is supposed to provide context to the stories on the left .. We are working on getting focus back to the news story.
Semantic analysis is performed on each story and we extract the relevant context. The eye candy is the social context .. Personally we as founders have found blogs/links very useful.. (We have even found reviews about taazza when looking at news about india or chennai).

Eye candy (photos/videos are useful. The question is how do we offer this without distracting the news story .. we will have an answer soon!

Hey i might be available Can use it to boot strap taazza.

I would suggest you go back take a look at the site with this new information. Might be useful for you and us (from feedback).

Also pls take a look at the mobile version.
admin on February 8th, 2007 8:10 pm

Ok, I’ll revisit keeping in mind the ‘news focus’. Social context eye candy is good from a regular user’s perspective (being a techie, i guess you get a biased opinion) :-)….I forgot about the mobile version..will do and update my review..