Hullabu.com - First Take

I hereby take liberty to write an uncensored review of my old school friend's maiden internet venture http://www.hullabu.com/.

While I don’t know what hullabu means, I can only appreciate the objective it sets out to achieve. In this age and time of myriad options on internet fighting for millions of internet user’s eye-balls and surfing time, many have actually developed a successful business model aggregating the content wherein all alternatives are available under one roof or under one URL, if you will. Travel portals like travelguru.com aggregates all flights and stay options from different vendors and make them available to potential travelers, bookmyshow.com does the same with movie options, bankbazaar.com does the same for financial products and I can go-on endlessly. I know few are trying to apply the aggregation concept to hitertho unexplored verticals like jobs, education as well.

I am not sure if any there is any other web property out there which does what hullabu seeks to do. It puts all the regularly visited portal segments of a typical user under one URL so that one need not put effort in trying to remember the URLs and browse them through different browser windows. It can make one’s web surfing experience much more efficient and structured. A typical user in a web session will check out a few

• News portals – to satiate his hunger for breaking news


• Financial news portals – to know how more or less wealthy he is


• Job portals - if he/she is in the market


• Matrimony portals - again if he/she is in the market ;)


• Shopping portals - if he/she doesn’t like going to the markets


• And search engines for all other one-time needs
  
  Some specific features of http://www.hullabu.com/ which I could figure out are


• One can add or delete categories to suit one’s needs


• One can add or delete websites within a category depending on one’s liking


• Recently visited websites are captured in the tabs at the top, which makes it easy to revisit them and also in a way summarizes the surfing journey for that session for the user
  
  A not so-sophisticated user like me so far relied on favorites, piecemeal measures like RSS feed for blogs etc, but now would seriously consider http://www.hullabu.com/ to approach surfing in a more organized fashion.
  
  While this is beta version, there are some areas of improvement like better and more “good on eye” colorful interface, automatic removal of duplicate tabs and resequencing of remaining tabs, more customization opportunities for the user and unless the creator has good reasons to hide his identity (read shying away from creditors) let people know who is behind the effort. Hope these would be taken care of in the final launch.
  
  Best wishes and congratulations!!
  Jampak