First off, let me apologize if my post felt rash or abrasive. As I mentioned before, I was not trying to be unduly harsh against bharat1.com — I was merely trying to balance out what I felt was a biased review. I think its great that you guys are focusing on the Indian news space, because frankly speaking, most Indian newspaper websites are just pathetic.

I can imagine the pains you are having with newspaper feeds. I’ve tried to add feeds from ToI, HT etc several times to my RSS reader but they just keep failing due to some error or the other. I wonder when these guys will wake up.

Here’s a suggestion: don’t just focus on text-feeds. There are some good India-focused pod-casts out there, so you should try to cover those. Or better instead, roll-out your own — this space is still to be conquered! I haven’t seen any India-focused vlogs out there, but keep an eye out for them.

All the best for the future, I’ll be keeping an eye on bharat1.com. Look forward to a *great* service!

Diwaker, Thanks for mentioning our site on your blogpost.

Your post was funny and dead-on! We do not claim to do anything that has not been done before. We only want to extrapolate some of the improvements that have been done in the web 2.0 world to the indian news consumption space.

Also, we do not compete with Netvibes at all. Once we offer our OMPL one should be able to browse our news sources via a RSS reader or possibly even Netvibes.

I do not personally know the author Kishore at Desicritics that wrote the review. :-) It was a glowing one and quite flattering as well. I have not communicated with Kishore yet and I am yet to thank him for this actually. It did help build up the motiviation of the team working on our site. Kishore did a good job of highlighting some of the techniques we employed to make it easy for the site users. Although these techniques are neither earth shattering nor novel by any stretch of imagination (As I pointed out by me on another blog: “I know this is not a an original idea by any stretch of imagination. My attempt is only to provide a superior user-experience compared to everyone else out there.”)

bharat1 is not totally ready yet as you mentioned. We are wrestling with the quality of the feeds that are getting delivered by these Indian newspapers at the moment.

Quite a few of the news sources we have do not offer direct RSS feeds. We are creating the feeds using a variety of mechanisms such as some online services, cron-jobbed site crawlers perl scripts etc. We had some challenges there to keep the feeds clean and will move quickly to provide the complete offering we have plans around. It is a very tedious scan / focus / cleanse operation :-)

We have plans to develop the core engineering modules of the site for the next 12+ months and I think we deployed only about 10% of the functionality that we eventually want to make available. We are currently brainstroming around the social features that could be potentially built leveraing the current content consumption infrstructure we are trying to perfect.

Again our core differentiators we believe in are:
- Variety of feeds available on the site and those that are under development

- Continued simplicity of interface regardless of the features we roll in, quite like google.com/ig that you mentioned

- Long-term investment into core backend engineering to build a robust platform offering with a 12-16 month development roadmap.

The goal is make it ultra simple for the end users such as a busy doctor in Chicago and a 60 yr old dad in New Delhi to consume the content and potentially participate in the process of content generation. Netvibes is a great product but I’m not sure how much adoption it has outside of the computer savvy demography. Although, I’d love the get the same level of buzz and adoption going is a specific demography at this time our goals and more modest and we are taking it one step at a time.

The reason we have the site out there is to generate sound and very valid feedback that we have received so far which gives us a strong sense of validation on our platform offering.

I noticed your domain in my google logs today and visited your site for the first time. I will add your blog to our list of blogs as well.

Thanks and will touchbase in the weeks ahead as we roll out newer functioanlity.

-Sid Meka