Appatic

Magma is the latest project from Andrew Baron, The creator of Rocketboom. As RB was pretty much the original vlog newscast (at least the first big one). One would expect Baron to have a good handle of running a site based around video. It is the case as the first thing you note when loading Magma website is a sense of pleasant familiarity. Not really a surprise since i find the design of the site being (even if not on purpose) a minimalist derivation of a mixing based of YouTube and The NewYork Times websites.

 

Maybe it is just me.

The design makes sense as Magma goal is to Aggregate and Curate the most popular, viral and better regarded videos by lifting them up from Online Video Portals (but mostly youtube), Social News Sites (mostly Digg and Reddit), News Sites (including NYT), Social Bookmarking Sites, Original Online Video Content Sites (College Humor, Break) and Finally its own members.

It does not ends there, as the videos then get their own land page where Magma shows a display of data based on the criteria. That the site uses to assign the videos a value that at the same times gets ranked against all the other videos in the site. Such criteria is based on Number of views, Links to video, Comments, Ratings, Etc.

The way Magma uses to show the fruits of that ranking is with a simple TOP 100 of Online Videos. A Scoreboard/Leaderboard of the videos that everyone has seen or should have seen, as they move Higher in the TOP 100 or fall off it over time.

What remains to be seen is how interesting it becomes beyond Online Video addicts, Social Media players, Content producers and the like. To see if it garners attention from a more general crowd. Even if it don’t archives that, i like the idea behind the site and it deserves to find its niche and thrive. Another way to see Magma, even if oversimplifying it would be to say that if Alltop did ok,why not the Alltop of video would do ok as well?.

But Magma is sure set to go beyond what it is now and be more than a Alltop of video or THE Online Video Aggregator according to what they expect to look like when they finally reach their potential.

If they archived that, they would indeed be more than a Social Online Video Portal as they are now and would truly become a Online Video Guide to go by.

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