Blogs everywhere have been talking about Gather.com’s recent $6 million in funding they received, and then critiquing their business model and site in a mostly negative way.
The most interesting post about them though in my opinion comes from Newsvine founder Mike Davidson. Mike takes an even road approach about it, saying that he’s sure Gather.com is full of good and well-meaning people. However, he points out some key differences between them and Newsvine. Gather has around 45 employees, Newsvine has 5. Looking at their sites, you feel like Gather.com has too many cooks in the kitchen wanting to do too many things. Newsvine has kept it lean and mean, and ended up showing that less can be more. The design is cleaner, the focus is more clear, and the execution is just less-garbled.
I absolutely agree. A clean interface is extremely important. Thats why at Seekum we are completely redesigning the interface and making it much better, and cleaner. Right now we are in beta, but our new interface is going to be much better and will more quickly enable users to vote up or down search results.
Sounds good Michael, if you’d ever like for me to test anything or provide feedback, let me know.
Sure come on by, I would be more then happy for you to provide some feedback. Email me, and I will give you the URL’s to some features not yet touted on the Seekum site as well.