Buzz.com and ManagedQ: Two Aggregators High on Features, Low on Anything New

Buzz.com and ManagedQ are the latest in the very crowded space of news aggregators, each hoping to make a splash by bringing a unique user interface to the concept.

Buzz.com, currently in closed beta, is a joint effort from AT&T and researchers at Northwestern University. With a pretty Flash interface, Buzz.com presents the news it aggregates in an easy-to-read format, and lets you filter by category, rating, date, URL, or flag only "hot topics." You can search by keyword, change the sort order, rate, and comment on articles as well.

Buzz.com's "unique" addition to the usual aggregator is a three-dimensional-ish narrator who will read the news to you. Somewhat similar to Voki, the narrator will read any stories to you or provide a summary in a fairly non-computer-like voice. I'm not particularly enamored with anything resembling an AI, however, unless it's speaking Simlish, and I read much faster than any one or -thing could, so I quickly turned this feature off, allowing me to browse the site somewhat more objectively.

Without the gimmick, whatever algorithm they are using for gathering and sorting the news is painfully naked and lacking. I checked the "Sci/Tech" category for a story I'd already covered for Profy, and found that not only was my article missing, but several scraper sites were listed, duplicating the exact content three and four times over in some cases.

ManagedQ, judging from their blog, had a soft launch last month, and is now in Alpha release. I'm not even entirely sure it can be called a news aggregator so much as a user interface, as it takes news from what appears to be your standard Google search and presents them in a more graphics-intense format. A side bar breaks the information down into subsets of a sort, with people (Person), tags (Thing), and locations (place), although even that appears fallible, as their own screen sot on their blog lists Gawker's Nick Denton as a place.

Each set of results is presented as eight tiled thumbnails with summary text, and the bottom of the screen shows both previous results and next results (again with tiny thumbnails). ManagedQ gets props for finding my article (or at least the home page of the Profy blog on which it appeared, but on my 15" MacBook display, the display seemed cluttered and busy. I may be used to the clean lines of a feed reader and Google's basic results, but I felt like I was being visually assaulted every time I ran a search.

The thumbnails aren't necessarily centered or compressed enough, so they often show nothing more than a large blue bar and title if they happen to link to a blog using the standard Wordpress template. The interface does let you search within results, however, and their load times have improved since I first looked at ManagedQ last week, so it's apparent this is still very much a work in progress.

I'm still waiting for an aggregator to hit it right out of the park for me. Neither Buzz.com nor ManagedQ managed to get there.