24.com launches Laaik.it

Breaking news on the local social media scene: 24.com, the internet arm of Media24, has launched its new social news and bookmarking site, Laaik.it. The news appears to be first broken by local blogger Charl Norman on his Bandwidth blog. I was alerted to it by Justin Hartman on Facebook. We’ve known for a while, via our spies, that it was coming — but didn’t know much about the name or the execution.

My first, initial impression? I haven’t tried the functionality, but the look and feel is nice and simple. I like the green, the logo and the clean look. I like the domain hack, although it’s spoilt by the redirection to “laaikit.24.com” — which perhaps serves to create the sense that it is not a brand in its own right? Like amatomu.com‘s shmaaks (votes), Laaik.it have gone local and colloquial with the name, which I like. It’s interesting that they didn’t create the site in open source/PHP, which is the vogue language for this stuff. Will this be an issue re: it gaining acceptance from the savvy community? Is this its target market or are they after a broader market?

Laaik.it’s competition is muti, a successful local social bookmarking site, which has been around for some time. The site has come under fire, not entirely justified in my opinion, from some quarters as being “elitist”. You can bet that 24.com is certainly going to link Laaik.it to its mothership, News24, if they have not done so already, which will have the effect of taking this to the mainstream.

Competition is a wonderful thing. Wonder how muti will respond, if at all?