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PakHeadlines- A portal for news headlines

November 6, 2008 1:12 pm 11 comments

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PakHeadlines is a new venture recently launched by two NUCES-FAST alums, Abdul Basit and Mustafa Haroon. Currently in beta, the Web site gathers news from popular news sources around Pakistan and aggregates the headlines on one single page.

The portal also provides links to live streaming of popular TV channels like AAJ TV, GEO and ARY. Mobile users can access this website on wap.pakheadlines.com

The design and usability index of the portal is ‘almost moderate’ with a simple design and content-focused approach. However, the Web site would have looked much better if the moderators have done a little more effort. Currently, they usability of the portal is quite low. Add to this the fact that small fonts are used for headlines (15 are displayed on the front page and the page is refreshed after every two minutes) and no abstracts are attached with them. They can fare better if they update the portal to display the most important news instead of giving headlines about the King of Bhutan and Bangladesh political crisis . Another drawback this website has is that they don’t have a large archive; users won’t be able to access news after its 5 days old.

While doing a review on this portal, I asked one of the team members about their plans of future expansion and if they have taken the permission from the channels shown on their website and if they can do well in this age of feed readers.

We’ve launched a very basic set of features in the beta release of our website. The prototype has been placed in the market to see the response of users. Yes, there are feed readers – tons of news website that are available out there. Although we took the risk to provide all headlines that are collected from popular news sources and place them on one single page, avoiding too much of news that one might have to read through any feed reader. All news is also linked back to their actual news source so that interested users can read more from the source. For the next upcoming release, we’ve planned to include full news from the sources so that users won’t have to run away here and there to read more. Quick access to weather forecast and we’re trying to include forex as well.

Let’s see if this venture is successful or….

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11 Comments

  • Osama A.
    November 6, 2008
    5:42 pm

    A layout like alltop would have been much better… infact doesnt alltop already have a pk section?

  • Obaid
    November 6, 2008
    9:08 pm

    I fail to see what they have done that will create a business value for the user?

    just creating a simple rss feed aggregator doesn’t mean anything to me. Are they creating a logical connection between these news stories?

  • Em
    November 6, 2008
    9:37 pm

    @Osama
    I agree that the layout otherwise would have looked much better. We really appreciate the review, cuz its helping us to grab better suggestions from the G&W community.

    @Obaid
    Yup, its a simple rss aggregator for now. However, we are working on full news and we hope to provide better news in our reader.

  • Obaid
    November 6, 2008
    10:01 pm

    Em: Glad that you are communicating. I hope that you guys improve the site with more features. :)

  • Harris Moin
    November 7, 2008
    8:20 am

    This can be a good university project but beyond that I see no purpose of this website when we already have some very good sites running specially http://www.pkpolitics.com.

    –Harris Moin

  • Asma
    November 7, 2008
    12:39 pm

    Apart from a news aggregator … do you people have other plans in mind too?

    Somehow I’m not able to see this as a startup venture.

  • Obaid
    November 7, 2008
    8:19 pm

    It just struck me today. Why doesn’t this post highlight the fact that they are providing “unauthorized” streams to all those Pakistani tv channels?

    Are we on such low morale grounds that we find nothing wrong with that?

  • Obaid
    November 7, 2008
    8:19 pm

    ok scrap that idea the links are fine, i was mistaken by some other site.. my bad.. :(

    *i am off to get some coffee in me before i loose my mind*

  • November 11, 2008
    2:47 am

    Though I’m sure the post/comments were beneficial to Mustafa and Abdul Basit, I just don’t think that reviewing half-baked projects is any use. No disrespect to the development team – I know they’re a talented duo with a great portfolio – but this project is simply not at a position to get a public review on G&W. It’s just a few RSS feeds aggregated onto a page, with some more links and text ads. No apparent problem solved and no design superiority. What’s the point… of the review?

  • Forexfires
    August 21, 2009
    8:56 pm

    Great resource thanks for writing

  • Apni PSP
    July 23, 2015
    8:00 pm

    Thanks for writing such a great resource keep it up

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