Mike Stopforth

A month ago multi-national media monolith Naspers announced the launch of 24.com.

From the press release:

In what is being heralded as the biggest online launch since the advent of the Internet in South Africa, Media24 has merged its digital arm with MWEB Studios, the division responsible for the development of web-based services, to create 24.com. Headed-up by Chief Executive Officer, Kim Reid, 24.com is the result of a Naspers drive to fuse complimentary digital properties into a consolidated and unsurpassable destination on the Internet for consumers. The new property will capture 60 percent of the local online audience.

I love the look of it. It has some sexy Web 2.0 design elements resulting in a clean look and feel and the branding is awesome. ‘24.com’ flows very nicely off my consumer-oriented tongue. I quickly noticed they offer a free mail account, so registered mikestopforth[at]24[dot]com - a relatively painless registration process. However the mailbox has only 100 Mb of storage space, which when compared with Gmail’s almost 3 Gb, is a bit archaic. Also, I might be wrong, but I can’t see any forwarding or POP settings, which I’d like.

The blogs are there too, M-Web style, which means limited functionality in terms of customisation, widgets and geeky things like trackbacks and so on. I guess they serve more as free market research than anything else. There is a messenger feature, but here again it’ll be hard for 24.com to overshadow giants like Skype, MSN and Google Talk. We’ll see.

So in summary 24.com strikes me as a pretty awesome portal - an enormous one considering the amalgamation of the brands involved - but still just a portal. Not much pull and a lot of push. I’d like to be able to customise content on the home page, see some RSS feeders and perhaps even a 24.com news aggregator. It’ll be an interesting space to watch.