TaaZZa softlaunch rocks BarCampChennai

TaaZZa in Hindi (rather Urdu) means ‘fresh’ ; in the context of a news aggregator, it signifies fresh news being streamed to you as and when it happens. But having seen the demo of the yet to be launched website, I think TaaZZa also brings a ‘taaza’ set of design ideas to this domain.

TaaZZa is the brainchild of Arjun Ram, who belongs to Chennai but works in the US. He started working on the project three months ago and seems to have done a great job in the short time. TaaZZa’s tagline is ‘Desh-Videsh-Sandesh’ - I think it’s simple, catchy and appropriate for the target audience.

What I liked about TaaZZa is the fact that while, technically it seems to be standing on the solid foundation of some of the best of web2.0 technologies (Ruby-on-Rails & AJAX), it also clearly stands apart from other Indian news aggregators in terms of its user interface design. The UI is a pleasing departure from the usual clutter that characterise other Indian news portals liked Samachar, JustSamachar or Rediff Newshound.

TaaZZa and its recipe of serving fresh news to its readers spawns three distinct dimensions - topics, people and places ; The topics (or news items) are basically pulled via RSS readers from mainstream news providers like GoogleNews, Yahoo etc ; the people dimension is actuated through the use of tags (autogenerated and not user specified - hey !! thats awesome !!) and the places dimension is effected through GoogleMaps (with its ability to zoom down into the geography of your choice). The demo that I witnessed was still in beta and hence, not fully functional; yet the intial preview was quite stunning. I haven’t seen anything remotely close to this in any other Indian news site currently.

(On a different note, what strikes me as simply mindboggling is the sheer speed with which you can develope a full blown application using Web2.0 frameworks like ROR & AJAX. Its not just about the backend but also the ability to integrate GoogleMaps, Flikr, Tag Clouds et al into the UI. Why, TaaZZa’s example could possibly serve as a poster for rapid developement using Web2.0 frameworks)

Not just this, users also have the ability to ‘digg’ into the stories , pretty much similar to how the original site works . While this is a cool feature to have, it may be a overkill for the currently immature Indian online news consumers. I think it may make sense to uncover some of these higher order features in a staggered manner, once a critical mass of readers get glued to the site.

Something like TaaZZa has to ride on the viral marketing wave to be commercially successful. The netizens of the web2.0 era have shown a preponderance to react favourably to those applications that stand apart in terms of their design paradigm. In this relation, (I think) Arjun could possibly consider some cool interactive paradigm like NewsMaps (or something else) just to add the ‘WOW factor‘ to his application. This need not necessarily be the default for the application but as a possible alternative to the main interface.

My query to Arjun about the intended business model behind TaaZZa did not give me a very convincing answer (yet). Maybe thats to be expected since thats how most community based web 2.0 business ideas work. Whats important is to get something out on the web, something that stands apart from the crowd, get people to use it, build a community around it ….once that happens the money will flow in. Either through internet advertising or a cash buyout from a predatory big brother in the same industry.

All in all, TaaZZa may just be the fresh (taazza) breath of air, the doctor ordered to spice up the bland ‘online news’ domain in India.