Truemors, Guy Kawasaki’s new startup, opened to the public about an hour ago.
We covered them last week when we were able to get into the beta. Truemors is a rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.
Top “truemors” right now: NBC to launch Heroes spinoff, a public scandal involving an Indian cricket star, and a story about a “hot chick” robbing an Austin bank.
I like the idea of truemors but they are launching very broadly. Digg became popular based on focusing on a tech niche to start (and it may be stuck there as it tries to expand). Truemors launches with ten different categories. The content may be too varied to appeal to any distinct audience.
Yeah that’s a little all-over-the-map for me to want to check back much. Who knows, it’ll probably be wildly successful if I don’t get it, so enjoy.
Who is Guy Kawasaki? Perhaps a link to his profile would help
Hm. This is useless. Any old crap is being posted on it.
It would not grow much until it has some real spicy stuff.
But why would anyone trust the spicy stuff? People can make anything up. Truemors will be used as a smear campaign.
I also agree in that you have to focus like Digg did at the beginnin … the notion of trying to take over the workd by storm at once makes no sense and it makes me personally loose interest.
So it’s like Digg + Twitter but they want to moderate to target a specific type of content.
Maybe they should have made the site focus on celebrity gossip instead of corporate rumors that people find boring and pointless. Fuckedcompany has that covered pretty much.
Looks like the “This site sucks.” Truemor is doing nicely! Yikes.
Would this site even be covered by TechCrunch if it wasn’t Guy K. who was launching it??? These “truemors” are pretty dumb…I think Guy needs to really consider having some sort of filtering system for these rumors or whatever….otherwise he’s going to get thousands of useless posts.
these sites (for example, including digg, but not facebook) should follow old school brand management/ positioning advice and rebrand their various follow-on categories (e.g. politics for digg) under separate labels. Consider P&G’s various brands. they might not benefit immediately traffic wise, but it will be best for the long run, if they want to be successful beyond their initial markets and make a statement in consumers’ minds.
I think they’ve turned off (or have begun) moderating submissions. Mine hasn’t appeared.
^ I retract that.
someone needs to come up with a start up that can find time on everyone’s schedule that they can use to waste on twitter, truemors and other web 2.0 “gems”…..I wanna use them, but it’s like now my head is spinning….
Would this site even be covered by TechCrunch if it wasn’t Guy K. who was launching it?
Indeed. It sucks.
Wow.. amazing I was there for 5 minutes, and almost all posts popping up are SPAM…. not very usefull I would say….
Appears that most of the comments on the site have got distinctively ‘twitter-like’ quality. They are not rumours, but rather chit-chat.
I think these guys need to raise the barriers for people to add rumours, so that only people who are serious about spreading the word are prepared to go through the motions. Making it easy to submit content strikes me as a mistake when you care about quality contributions. Rating rumours on the other hand could remain very easy.
High barriers to entry doesn’t mean a company can’t be successful. Good examples of successful start-ups with high barriers to entry are eHarmony, Facebook (in its early days), and iStockphoto. They all recognised that if you rely on external content to provide value to the community as whole, you have to make sure the quality is high. The best way to do this is to make it ‘reasonably’ hard to add content: hard enough, but not too hard.
Strikes me the balance of how hard it is to contribute content here is possibly too low. As a consequence, there is too much stuff that isn’t even rumours (regardless of how god they may be).
This is old news. Truemors has been live since last week.
Here is my video review of the service:
http://www.cent...s-i-dont-get-it
I just don’t get how this will be a success unless the founders name can carry it.
I also don’t understand how the items get over to the “greatest” category. The “truemors sucks” item has the most votes but is not on the list.
the rumor that has the highest score (52 and counting) is “This site sucks”. That says it all.
this is crap. am shocked that guy kawasaki will be involved in this. i am not surprised that mike will report this – afterall he is king of kickbacks.
he writes whatever craps his friends decides to launch. crapcrunch !!!
Because I’m incredibly immature, I put up “the number” on truemors (DVD Hack) followed by the words “required web 2.0 startup”. A few minutes later, my entry had been edited by someone named Jason to only include the last 4 words. The number was gone.
Some truemors….
This is a business? You must be kidding. Yawn.
While I appreciate Guy, I thought this would be a little more impressive. It is pretty uninspiring to me, unless they have some other ideas up their sleeves.
Dumb concept indeed. Perhaps some value if each post is tied directly to articles/video posted on some 3rd party website as a “credible validation” of the rumor, though I doubt it.
A really dumb idea actually.
I feel bad for the moderators of this site. I just went there and a user by the name of geronimo has flooded the board with this message “the truemors homepage is easy tp spam”. It may be too early to tell, but this site seems to be paralleled with Cragslist rants and raves. Best of luck to Guy in his venture.
And now it’s been removed… Have fun moderators.
What happened to that picture preview thing that Guy was heavily promoting on his site?
“Would this site even be covered by TechCrunch if it wasn’t Guy K. who was launching it???”
I don’t think so… a lot better sites get passed by. No offence to Guy, but this really seems like a silly gimic. I really wonder what the criteria is the TechCrunch uses in choosing their reviews actually. Can you elaborate on your this please Techcrunch/Mike?
This concept is DOA. It’s like being forced to look at all the lowest-rated stuff on digg.
TSW, in there defence though, if they have gotten their ranking algorithms right, the content will get better as the site progresses and once all these techies stop posting random crap to it just to try it out.
Poked around for a bit. It has some whizzy ajax going on. Nonetheless, I’m shocked Guy is involved with this deadpool candidate.
Guy’s a great . . . guy; but for many reasons (i.e., “wasn’t that the guy who had that nutty truemors site that went under some years back?”), this is a terrible mistake.
I’m a regular reader over at Guy’s blog, so I witnessed the backlash at his post a few weeks back when he was sourcing new employees of this project.
Looks like a neat service though. I agree that it needs to find its niche, but I suspect Guy knows as much. Maybe he’s just “trying a lot of things and seeing what works.” Who knows.
Wow, who needs TechCrunch now that I can find out about Lindsay Lohan, Emo Pizza, and Airline Peanuts at Truemors? (What a bunch of garbage!)
this is so freakin stupid, it may just work… I guess Guy considers himself the Perez Hilton of the tech world.
certainly not worthy of a techcrunch post, unless you’re a FOM
maybe a better name for this site is:
palcrunch.com, fomcrunch.com, youscratchmybackiscratchyourbackcrunch.com, siliconmafiacrunch.com,
Looks like site is being spammed pretty badly…
http://truemors.com/?p=817
http://truemors.com/?p=825
- “Michael arrington is moving to Israel to start a youtube for Jews”
Is this true?
I actually like the interface. The tools for tagging and such are well done. This would be infinitely better if (1) they stuck to a category or two and (2) they moderated the comments. THings that are obvious spam need to be filtered out before they make the front page. I imagine the team is either working on SPam prevention or counting on a passionate community to moderate for them via negative votes. The former would be tricky since the site is based on “rumors”, the latter is not something i would bet on.
Let’s just say there’s someone on the other end editing “inappropriate” posts. If they want to prevent that sort of thing, then for the love of God have the common sense to require registration at least. Blind, careless posting sucks almost as badly as blind, careless censorship.
Besides why not just use reddit or digg? Do we REALLY need another social site with a “big name” behind it, and little else?
Even dumber than Twitter.
I’ve notice that they are rigging the votes, and adding +1000 to their own.
how can everyone criticize guy like this? hasn’t he proved himself over at garage?
how can everyone criticize guy like this? hasn’t he proven himself over at garage?
You’re only as good as your LAST job, not your best job.
hint:
http://
truemors.com
/blog/wp-content/plugins/postratings/postratings.php
?pid=828
&rate=999
As if it’s not enough, there is another site launched yesterday called SianAh where you can tell people what’s bothering you today!
It’ll probably appeal to the grumblers.. which means about everyone on the planet.
So now we have a site to tell people what we’re doing (twitter), another to tell people what others might possibly be doing (truemors), and another to tell people what other’s are doing to us (sianah)!
http://www.sianah.com
Guy did some great stuff — he’s a legend in our industry. Yet… every great man does dumb things, and Truemors is one of them. Perhaps it’ll get some traction with a certain set, but it is likely the most useless thing I have ever seen — and I agree with another poster — it this wasn’t Guy I dont think Mike would have covered it this extensively.
Hmmm not sure about this one. It doesn’t appear to be that useful yet (could change in time I guess…) and the whole thing is built on Wordpress which suggests it took whatever outsourced company who built it all of 1 day to sling together after the design was signed off on. Not to say that fast development == slapdash product but this thing has been in “development” for some period of time now, I guess I expected more than a Wordpress custom theme and some post rating plugins.
Good luck to Guy and the team on making this work though. With a little moderation it could be a fun place.
brian that shows its all about who you know…mike will cover any junk as long as his friends are involved in it…
@#45
haha. that’s one of the problems with using a bunch of off-the-shelf plugins and combining it with not knowing what the hell you are doing. Just changing some url strings and being able to “hack” the score is such a retardedly simple security hole – any developer worth his salt should at least be limiting each rating to an increments of 1 each time. That I can simply add “9999999999″ to that url string and give my post a super high rating is silly.
This site was clearly not tested or built by people who have made CGM sites before.