May 15, 2007

Truemors Launches

Michael Arrington

105 comments »

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.

  • Sphere It

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Truemors - just like Reddit, only for rumors
  2. Wielki Guy Kawasaki zrobił…Truemors at AntyWeb
  3. Deep Jive Interests » Truemors: A Lesson For Web2.0 Startups — Celebrity Is Important.
  4.   Truemors Launches, Still Not Impressed by Betaflow
  5. Community is the hard part » mathewingram.com/work
  6. Truemors Launches « Camtastic- Digital Camcorder Blog
  7. Truemors is live: Read the Mysterious Beta invite email, Revel in the SPAM « TechFold
  8. dealicious » Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors geht live
  9. Web 2.0 Sammelalbum - Web2Null - Truemors
  10.   Daily Mobile News Roundup 16-05-2007 - Mobile Marketing Watch
  11. Web2.0 Effect Blog Web 2.0 Blog Technology Help » Blog Archive » Rough start for Truemors site
  12. The Jeff Beckham Weblog » The Truemor Mill
  13. budiputra.com :: Truemors: Tell the world (the niche thing)!
  14. The Wrong Advices
  15. Truemors or Falsemors—- The bad side of Truemors (inside out)--Tech,Fun,This n That at www.Hem.com.np
  16. Truemors.com is Operating on Wordpress : Reviews of Wordpress Plugins and Themes | Testing Free WordPress Themes | Wordpress Tutorials and Tips
  17. Help Me Crush Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors
  18. » News to know: Ubuntu Server; WinHEC; Windows Home Server; Linus Torvalds | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
  19. digital thoughts » Blog Archive » True Rumors
  20. Truemors « Monkey on Wordpress
  21. Leveraging Ideas :: The Blog of Sam Huleatt: social media, technology and startups
  22. Hoe Guy Kawasaki Truemors bouwde en lanceerde voor EUR 9.000 at Enthousiasmeren
  23. Truemors: Guy Kawasaki's useless website that comes with a $12,000 price tag | King Gary
  24. Truemors For Facebook
  25. Truemors For Facebook : Teknicks Blog
  26. Just a random blog !
  27. Truemors For Facebook | Tekjuice.com
  28. 831547565
  29. Louisa Hughes » Blog Archive » Worst Speech Ever: Guy Kawasaki on Stupid Ideas, Indefensibility and Being a Mensch
  30. The Guy Kawasaki Challenge » Expert Idiot
  31. Innovation, Disruption and The Economics of Free  »TechAddress

Comments

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  1. Kewtr

    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.

  2. Jessica

    Who is Guy Kawasaki? Perhaps a link to his profile would help

  3. Paul

    Hm. This is useless. Any old crap is being posted on it.

  4. Free Dating Site

    It would not grow much until it has some real spicy stuff.

  5. Paul

    But why would anyone trust the spicy stuff? People can make anything up. Truemors will be used as a smear campaign.

  6. DinoHorse

    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.

  7. Alaska Miller

    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.

  8. Paul

    Looks like the “This site sucks.” Truemor is doing nicely! Yikes.

  9. Mike

    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.

  10. rami

    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.

  11. Paul

    I think they’ve turned off (or have begun) moderating submissions. Mine hasn’t appeared.

  12. Paul

    ^ I retract that. :D

  13. tekwek

    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….

  14. Sprezzatura

    Would this site even be covered by TechCrunch if it wasn’t Guy K. who was launching it?

    Indeed. It sucks.

  15. DinoHorse

    Wow.. amazing I was there for 5 minutes, and almost all posts popping up are SPAM…. not very usefull I would say….

  16. Jens

    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).

  17. Choch Beez

    This is old news. Truemors has been live since last week.

  18. Allen Stern

    Here is my video review of the service:
    http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ont-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.

  19. EmperorFrost

    the rumor that has the highest score (52 and counting) is “This site sucks”. That says it all.

  20. Gage Simpson

    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 !!!

  21. Phil

    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….

  22. Joe

    This is a business? You must be kidding. Yawn.

  23. SorenG

    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.

  24. WHAT!?

    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.

  25. Soso

    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.

  26. Soso

    And now it’s been removed… Have fun moderators.

  27. met

    What happened to that picture preview thing that Guy was heavily promoting on his site?

  28. Tony

    “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?

  29. TSW

    This concept is DOA. It’s like being forced to look at all the lowest-rated stuff on digg.

  30. Tony

    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.

  31. Tony

    Poked around for a bit. It has some whizzy ajax going on. Nonetheless, I’m shocked Guy is involved with this deadpool candidate.

  32. Steve Morsa

    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.

  33. Brian Lash

    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.

  34. Joe Duck

    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!)

  35. B S meter

    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,

  36. Guy Kawosoki

    Looks like site is being spammed pretty badly…

    http://truemors.com/?p=817

  37. heh

    http://truemors.com/?p=825
    - “Michael arrington is moving to Israel to start a youtube for Jews”

    Is this true?

  38. Colin Dowling

    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.

  39. datter

    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?

  40. David Jacobs

    Even dumber than Twitter.

  41. Joe

    I’ve notice that they are rigging the votes, and adding +1000 to their own.

  42. kent

    how can everyone criticize guy like this? hasn’t he proved himself over at garage?

  43. kent

    how can everyone criticize guy like this? hasn’t he proven himself over at garage?

  44. datter

    You’re only as good as your LAST job, not your best job.

  45. Paul

    hint:

    http://
    truemors.com
    /blog/wp-content/plugins/postratings/postratings.php
    ?pid=828
    &rate=999

  46. Alex Choo

    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

  47. Brian

    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.

  48. yongfook

    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.

  49. smokey

    brian that shows its all about who you know…mike will cover any junk as long as his friends are involved in it…

  50. yongfook

    @#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.

  51. Techcrunch Journalists have 666 sign back in their necks

    Hey, Guy Kawasaki.

    That’s soul sell out!!! Why would you sell yourself to devils?
    You should go back to Garage.com. Everyone believe in you. You can handle Garage.com. Now, Truemors. Sounds like you sell your soul to hell.

    This is one of worst web 2.0 innovation every brought up. We see no cool technology.

  52. B S meter

    never underestimate the ability of your readers to smell BS…

  53. patricia

    I’m so weirded out by this entire thread of comments.

    Tomorrow, there will a post about another widget company or social network and everybody will be nodding in unison about how spot on it is :)

    Cut Guy some slack. If it’s no where in six months, then the bashing will be fair.

  54. zippo

    ick! How is this worthy of news? Exhibit “A” for why techcrunch isn’t worth reading.

    There are much better sites than “truemors”!

  55. yongfook

    patricia > I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that people have much higher expectations from someone like Guy Kawasaki than they would from some bedroom coders or small startup who are putting out a widget. The fact that Kawasaki is so ubiquitous in the industry raises the bar a little and makes him and his products much, much more open to criticism. Them’s the breaks.

  56. James

    Doesn’t this make the book title “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki seem kinda funny?

  57. Baron

    Not so easy to be on the other side of the fence, is it Guy? If this same type of company were brought to your attention, I wonder if you would fund it.

  58. Brett

    @#45

    I can’t BELIEVE they haven’t fixed this security hole yet!!!

    Do they really think it’s possible for any one ‘truemor’ to have more than several thousand hits already?

    I’m beginning to think this whole Truemor thing is more of an experiment than a legitimate site….

  59. bilbo

    “Who is Guy Kawasaki? Perhaps a link to his profile would help”

    Mangina. Supporter of Feminism.

  60. Mallik

    Poorly tested site, poor integer arithmetic is causing overflows making the scores as either 2147483648 or -2147483648 :D One such rumor by me http://truemors.com/?p=969

  61. Drama 2.0

    I definitely agree with yongfook on this one. I have a lot of respect for Guy and his blog is one of my favorite business blogs, so the question that I had to ask when I first heard about Truemors was “Why?” It’s not the worst Web 2.0 concept out there (that’s not saying much), but it certainly isn’t very exciting and wouldn’t warrant any attention if Guy wasn’t involved. The potential for it as a business seems very marginal, especially for somebody like Guy.

    If smart, experienced people are finding it desirable to launch “startups” like this instead of doing something truly interesting, I think it’s wise to ask whether Web 2.0 is driving innovation or whether it’s really holding it back.

  62. dean

    What a useless web site, why even cover it?

  63. sonja

    Look at Kawasaki’s most recent blunders. Guy was successful…in 1.0.
    Loo you take a look

  64. Edwin Khodabakchian

    The question is why wouldn’t Guy try something like this? With very little money, you can put something out that people can try. Thanks to Techcrunch and his blog, he can get a lot of feedback and iterate the design to try to address them. Within 3-6 months he can determine if this is something worth developing or killing and those 3-6 months end up being a great learning experience.

  65. Venture Itch

    Reading Truemor (just like Twitter) is as exciting as watching drying paint. No brainer recipe to get traffic, provided somebody prominent like Guy Kawasaki stands behind it to get initial buzz. Truemor promotion started long before the site come alive. For Kawasaki it has touch of genius - he just created money machine from almost nothing. I believe that such site can be be built within budget of a few thousand dollars (probably Wordpess plus Ajax plus integration for SMS posting). For average Joe - such site would be cloned long before it would get noticed.

  66. patricia

    @ yongfook, I understand what you’re saying but not everything somebody creates has to be “appropriate” for what others expect. Maybe Guy is just having fun with an idea. Maybe it’s going to be a big thing, maybe not. But, i know as an innovator and entrepreneur, lots of my ideas don’t make sense to other people. Nobody “got” the concept initially of standing in the mirror and taking your photo - today, my site StyleDiary is doing really well and has had a few acquisition offers :)

    Just sayin’. I like Guy and am a friend, so I’m biased, but people should cut some slack, that’s all.

  67. pallet jack

    Yeah covered - with spa/\/\ . terrible

  68. matthew

    that site can’t be for real. honestly.

  69. Hari

    Does Truemors run on Wordpress ?

    The reason i am asking this is : http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/9144/truxc9.jpg

    I got it when i visited Truemors today.

  70. zippo

    Baron, #57: +1

  71. Ozh

    Mostest uselessest site everest.

  72. LazyOnlineMoneyMaker

    Good concept. However, like what most people say, we’ve seen this on reddit.

    Who know, it might really be a huge success!

  73. TeamTutorials

    This is great, maybe the spammers will stop wasting time with my email and just spam this site!

  74. Gustav M

    Truemors is starting to get some use…the SMS posting technology by GoLive! Mobile (www.golivemobile.com) is pretty neat…very fast and convenient. The SpinVox (www.spinvox.com) module for posting by voice call is also interesting, but takes quite a while to post I’ve noticed. A rather fun and innovative site in my opionin.