Octopus.com has a new design
I like this slick blue theme, which like OnePage’s site focuses on professionals. Octopus’ ability to penetrate enterprise accounts will depend on what data sources it can access, beside HTML pieces. Beyond simple metabrowsing, this space is getting crowded with players such as Moreover or Yahoo that leverage their ability to aggregate hundreds of data sources.
On the meta data battle front, I’m not sure Octopus is able to "understand" the content it is collecting, so their aggregation services might be too superficial to be real useful. Let’s say for instance that I build a page dedicated to the stock market, how do I enter a ticker symbol in one part so that it updates all of the other sources as well? I’m not talking about using Octopus objects of course, the point is to have different external sources talk to each other.
The redesign didn’t address all usability problems. In edit mode, I’m amazed you have to double-click on the items you want to add to your page. In reading mode, the contextual menu doesn’t include "Open in a new window" when you right-click on links.
