Former Yahoo Indonesia Launches Peneroka

Today, former Yahoo! Indonesia Country Editor Budi Putra and Jimmy Kembaren (also ex-Yahoo) announces their new project, and sure enough it's a blog. Sort of.

The two partners for their next project where Kembaren handles the product & engineering and Budi handles the content, and believe me when I say that they're really good at what they do. Their new project is called Peneroka, an Indonesian word for "pioneer", and they have a good reason to call it "pioneer". While Peneroka is basically an online magazine with content and all, it's actually a new way of seeing content and an experiment from the two based on how users consume content on the web.

Peneroka is an online magazine, but if you look at the frontpage they only have 4 articles. Budi told us that they limit one "edition" to 4 articles, and that one edition is not necessarily limited to one day and in one day they can have multiple editions.

Go figure that out.

The philosophy behind this complicated scheme is that Kembaren is convinced that users aren't looking for content, they want the news handed to them. Give user less options and make it as simple as possible for them to consume the content. The same reason is used by Kembaren to omit the ability for users to find information, no search engine and no archive. If you miss a news, you miss a news.

To be honest, I kinda like the idea of "less is more", but deleting search and archiving function on a content site doesn't seem to be a good idea for me. But again, Budi Putra and Kembaren insists that this project is more of an experiment on content delivery and I see it as a new way to consume content to users and that they're very open to feedback from users.

Sooner or later, someone has to come up with a new way of seeing content, obsolete the current concept of content delivery. They may fail, but they are the pioneers.