Regator, a new blog aggregator that hopes to reduce the blogosphere down to consumable chunks for the average user, has launched today in private beta. The site acts like a combination between Digg and a standard RSS reader, allowing users to vote on the most popular stories drawn from 3,000 blogs that have been hand-picked by Regator editors. TechCrunch readers looking to try the site can get one of 100 invites here by entering the code “techcrunch”.
The Ajax-heavy site seems best suited for users who aren’t interested in heavy-duty blog reading. There’s no way to add an RSS feed that isn’t already on the site, and the sharing options seem to be limited compared to more mature offerings like Google Reader. Each story has voting arrows which allow users to determine the most popular articles - a nice touch, but one that may turn Regator into a Digg-clone instead of a more general news reader.
Beyond standard text search, Regator offers an audio and video search across its indexed blogs, but the results aren’t always appropriate - a video search for “Yahoo” yielded a YouTube trailer for the movie Wanted as the second highest hit.
Regator will see competition from a number of blog aggregators, which include Blogged, which launched a similar feature yesterday, and TechMeme, which uses an algorithm rather than user input to rate top stories.
Barack Obama still number one..?
It’s Bloglines all the way for me. Of course I work there, and I’m working on an awesome redesign.
I am sick of registrations that require creating a username. Just use my email as username.
do you have guides for that? i can’t open the main site sir… thanks!
I guess a lot of people are subscribed to way to many blogs and then they miss the posts that they are really interested in or that are critical say to their business or industry. Having others decide or vote what’s good for me is a double edged sword.
I like the name. any connection with Florida? Gators
Being part branding guy (see sabet.com) and part character designer (see mojizu.com) I find that regator has done a wonderful job with hiring a great illustrator to develop their mascot.
But illustrations don’t make the best identities. Great identities are simple and iconic, even whimsical ones.
I suggest keeping the gator as a friendly mascot to the site, but creating a professional brand identity to identify the site. A great identity can be used in many different mediums and should work in 1 or 2 colors as it does in multiple. It will also be very difficult to distinguish what it is if you shrink the logo, not unlike the seesmic logo. good luck guys.
http://www.tallchat.com
———————————————————————
tall singles turn to tall mingles
Are they aligned with Afrigator.com? If not I wonder if there will be any legal issues? Sounds like a bit of a stolen idea to me. Similar logos, same color scheme, same concept.
@Ali Sabet graet branding, almost like the afrigator branding, logo, aligator, wow very similar to afrigator indeed http://www.afrigator.com
Just much younger.
Great steal Regator! C’mon, did you really think you would be able to pull off the fact you blatantly copied everything about afrigator.com?
Even the functionality looks like Afrigator.com.
C’mon techcrunch guys - did you guys not research a bit and see this is a ripoff from Afrigator.com -
Yea what the guys said above, serious rip off of afrigator.
Not every feed aggregator is a rip off of the last one…
AFAIC, Afrigator stole the whole “reptile” thing from “News Gator”, so let’s climb down off of our soapboxes commenters, and just move along… you don’t like Regator, i don’t blame you… but avoid calling it a ripoff, especially a ripoff of a ripoff…
kinda sad. happy 4th of july, TC.
Regator is ok… if you still play with crayons.
A social uprise against regator is only necessary!
because regator stole Afrigator’s brand!
what does it take to come up with something more original huh?
Who gives a shit about Afrigator? Why don’t you stop filling up the comments with all of your sock puppets? I’m sure more people have mentioned Afrigator in these comments than have ever even used or heard of Afrigator.
The smiling alligator and name look appealing and inviting eventhough there are to many aggregator site outhere , i’m still sure this site can fill up the lackness of other site.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
The Architect: an entire continent of future readers gives a shit about afrigator,
Hi! I am one of the co-founders of Regator.
We’re sorry you feel upset about this, but we had not even heard of afrigator until reading these comments. really. The reason we are called regator is because it a shortened form of agg-”regator” (that and the domain was available). The alligator made an obvious mascot and they are green so we chose a palate to match.
I can honestly say that it is pure coincidence… and we are sorry if we have offended anyone. It was not our intent.
Ali Sabet - thanks for the compliment on the mascot illustration that was drawn by us!
Both Afrigator and Regator derive their names from ‘Aggregator’. The noun hiding in that word is ‘gator’. It seems obvious to me that both brands have jumped on this. I doubt there is anything more to it than that.
So instead of jumping to conclusions, lets rather congratulate the Regator guys on a good-looking site
Good job Scott, i like regator’s design more than afrigator’s.
@the haters above, both are green color template so what? Since when did you see a blue alligator?
I had the pleasure of chatting with Justin and the afrigator guys today and they have retracted what they said earlier about Regator doing anything close to copyright infringement as our site is anything but identical to theirs, even by coincidence, once they actually saw the site and we had a chat. They are good guys and this was just a misunderstanding that snowballed. Shows you can’t believe everything you hear on the internet…
You can see Justin’s post here: http://justinhartman.com/2008/07/04/regatorcom-...
Cheers!
Sweet have someone else do the searching for good blogs. Will check out Regator.
cool site , thanks
I have put some info together if anyone would like the list of great websites to go and get some great stuff…Just let me know…I’ll send it to you….I also have a list of free websites-get ton’s of stuff for free,,,
Missy