Sunday, January 15, 2006

Gather

Gather is a sort of blogspace microcosm, including a virtual currency (“Gather Points”) for writing blog articles, the ability to write, read & rate blog articles, and so on. You find quite a few nice features like tag clouds, a “similar” link on ads that opens up more ads, friends connections to browse, expandable topic lists, and a focus on search.

Unfortunately, the JSP-driven site is quite cluttered, contains very small fonts, and uses the forbidden “B” word next to its logo. But that’s nothing a redesign couldn’t solve.

Here’s what Steve Rubel thinks of the site (emphasis mine):

“As I have said previously, a Web 2.0 crash is coming. The online ad market isn’t big enough to support this site. What’s worse, they’re not relying on Adsense. They’re trying to court advertisers themselves. They don’t have the deep pocket corporate backing that Bloglines, Topix, Yahoo and others have to support citizen journalism with a big investment.”

Gather by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

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