TechFuga, which has been in beta for a few months now, but well reviewed by many sites has come live this morning with version 2.0. From initial observations of this site, I think they have a lot to offer. The top half looks very nice on the main page.
We are all use to seeing this look via Techmeme, the leader in online news aggregation – mainly tech news aggregation. TechFuga offers tabs across their top that break things down for the reader into – Home, Top News, Latest News, and Upcoming News. That is a nice feature that they have put out there for readers. Makes hunting for new items or even older items much easier.
TechFuga however has changed it up via their middle and a bottom sections. The middle has feeds they pull in from the various services that they happen to choose to include.
Notice that Techmeme is given proper acknowledgement as the first feed listed. Once you continue past the feeds, you arrive at their bottom section.
The bottom area gives you even more news that might make a splash headline soon. This gives everyone the opportunity to be the first to give an angle on the news.
Acknowledging that twitter is a powerful news service with the twitter search is quite nice to have. This also again shows that twitter has put a permanent stamp on the internet and society in general as a huge force that isn’t going away.
The search on TechFuga, vs say Techmeme is what opened my eyes up to the darker side of TechFuga. On their blog, they are stating the main items that were fixed in order to launch this version 2.0 to the public.
Among many other enhancements, the most relevant open to the publish today are:
1. New UI graphics to make it better to scan the news.
2. New search/clustering algorithm
3. New section for upcoming news: news not yet popular -upcoming- in services such as, Digg, Hacker News and Reddit among others.
4. New search section: search by relevance/clustering including or simply by date. Advanced search will also allow news publishers to check their stories that are making the headlines on the most popular news sites. In addition, Twitter Search also integrated.
5. More news sources included.
On the last item (#5 on their list), I have to put a bit of thought out there.
Can you tell me which big well known blog happens to be omitted from the news source? That one disturbs me a bit, as TechFuga never claims to be totally automated, they also look very well covered (source wise) on the surface. That is until you poke around a bit. You will read the following information on their about page, along with shout outs which are shown on the page.
About TechFuga: The ultimate tech news aggregator
All the top tech buzz, updated every 5 minutes, for all tech news from the most popular news sites – in just one page – ; techfuga provides the user a gate to a quick access to the most popular, buzzed, voted, discussed and linked tech stories.
Bigger isn’t always better, and if you omit sources by either mistake or oversight, than you are doing something that you shouldn’t do, which is censoring good content from being read. Not only that, you are also taking possible readership away from sources that deserve it.
Content aggregation is a good thing. Content aggregation with any hidden agenda is something that shouldn’t happen.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7faaeab2-60a0-424f-987d-a37bba062f42)
