Herrd.com in the dotcom deadpool? Caribdaily.com the new frontrunner

We first wrote about the Barbados-based company Herrd.com – (the Caribbean News Social Network where you can share, discover, bookmark, and promote Caribbean stuff that’s important to you) when they were weeks old. The fresh-faced Caribbean startup which launched in July 2007 was mapping the global online trend of news via social networking, gunning to be the number one in the region, like the America-based Digg.com is now globally. They were on a sweet growth path until recently. We reported in November last year that we got a suspected malware site warning every time we surfed on over there. Nowadays, that picture you see with this blog post is what we’ve been getting. Have they hit the dotcom dead pool or are they regrouping?

We hope Herrd.com has not died as we believed that the site, which was in fact a Caribbean version of digg.com, understood its role, the trend, the market they were seeking to serve (The Caribbean Region and over US$40bn annual purchasing power Caribbean Diaspora) and out of all their competitors, they nailed site design and user interface.

A check on their competitors revealed the following… CaribScoop.com (Jamaica) is still live online but has not shown much growth, onspotreport.com (Jamaica) went into the dead pool as soon as it started a year ago and with herrd.com in the dead pool or in the throws of a comeback, the new front runner is caribdaily.com.

Caribdaily.com is an aggregator of news headlines from Caribbean newspapers and blogs and they kept it simple from day one. They didn’t try to create their own news via a contributor network, they didn’t rely on people herrding or digging Caribbean news content they found- they simply have made it easier and more convenient for Caribbean nationals globally to get a snapshot view of what’s happening in the Caribbean by categorizing the news and information by country and popular topics and providing direct links to the full story. My advice to caribdaily.com at this time is:

1. Start gathering headlines from quality Caribbean blogs.

2. Update the site design.

3. Tweak the information architecture to make it even easier to navigate the site.

4. Upgrade the Facebook App as this can be a killer tool for marketing and if you guys only knew how many Caribbean nationals are in Facebook, you’ve have done this ages ago.

5. Spend some time and money marketing the site, it has great potential to be a winner and enjoy longevity.

Related posts

Who will be the Caribbean’s DIGG, as mainstream Caribbean Media’s relevance dwindles?

Herrd.com a suspected Malware site ?

Cariblogger.com – the Caribbean’s First Blog Network

Caribbean Blog Revolution Brewing