Remember the old Techmeme of a week ago, before the new design took effect? Sure, the new design is easy on the eyes. But is it better?
Personally, I’m already used to the new look, other than the sponsored posts stuck in your face in the new middle column (push those to the right, please, where ads belong). But some people just can’t let go of the past—people like Eric Marcoullier (founder of OneTrueFan, Gnip, and MyBlogLog).
Marcoullier hates the new design so much that he created a Chrome extension to revert it back to its old look. The main feature he cannot live without is the underlined links. In the new design, the underlines are gone, making the site much cleaner with more room to breathe. But it also removes a key part of the information density which makes the site so useful, argues Marcoullier.
Techmeme’s headlines and excerpts now makes it look more like a blog or other primary news source than a link aggregator. Partly that is because the links have been de-emphasized. Marcoullier thinks it is easier to parse the different sources when they are underlined than when they are separated only by a comma and spaces that make them look too similar to the excerpted text below the main headline. You can see a before and after below.
Which one do you think is more scannable? I always found the underlines too cluttered. But seeing them here next to the new look, Marcoullier does have a point that the source names in the “More” section now tend to bleed into each other when the conversation gets too dense.
Techmeme, “the favorite news website of technology industry insiders” (Bloomberg) and “one of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning” (NYT), is the tech industry’s leading news aggregator. Introduced in 2005, the company added Mediagazer in 2010 to track media news. Other verticals include memeorandum (politics) and WeSmirch (celebrity news). Operating originally as Google News-style fully-automated news aggregators, the company blended in human editors to the curation process at Techmeme and Mediagazer beginning in...
In March 2008 Eric Marcoullier founded Gnip. Prior to Gnip, Eric Marcoullier founded MyBlogLog with Todd Sampson in January of 2005. The service went live in March 2005 and was acquired by Yahoo for an estimated $10 million in January 2007. He left Yahoo in July 2007. Eric previously co-founded games and entertainment content portal IGN, where he also served as the Product Guy through its pre-IPO spinoff in 1999. IGN was purchased by News Corp. in 2005 for $650...
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