I have to say that while Regator has certain elements that share a close resemblance to us I’m of the opinion that Scott and his team did not do this maliciously as I had initially suspected.

I was fortunate enough to have a discussion with Scott Lockhart (co-founder) via email where he assured me that they had not even heard of Afrigator until today. He also gave me access to the Regator beta website and I’ve gone through it extensively.

Having spoken candidly with Scott and seeing what Regator is all about I’m convinced this was simply a coincidence. If anything, Regator is a mashup of a content aggregator with Digg/Reddit style bookmarking functionality and I can now see that when Regator goes live there will be little confusion between our two respective sites.

I wish Scott and his team all the best with their new venture. It’s a tough market but they’re off to a great start.

Regator.com went into private beta today and I picked it up via this Techcrunch article. They’ve also got great exposure on ReadWriteWeb and even Mashable.

These guys are a blog aggregator that not only use the Afrigator crocodile, similar domain name and colour scheme and I have to feel this is a little more than a coincidence.

There is little doubt that Mike, Stii, Mark and myself will need to speak to our legal team to find out what action we can take on this.

What do you guys think?

UPDATE: I’ve had a long chat with Scott from Regator and I’m now convinced it was a coincidence. Please see my updated post here.