Truemors Launches

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1. Kewtr
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 12:52 pm

   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
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

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

3. Paul
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 12:55 pm

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

4. Free Dating Site
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 12:58 pm

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

5. Paul
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

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

6. DinoHorse
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

   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
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

   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
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

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

9. Mike
   

   May 15th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

   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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:09 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

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

12. Paul
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:11 pm

    ^ I retract that.

13. tekwek
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

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

    Indeed. It sucks.

15. DinoHorse
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:15 pm

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

16. Jens
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

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

18. Allen Stern
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:51 pm

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

20. Gage Simpson
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

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

23. SorenG
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    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!?
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

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

27. met
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

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

28. Tony
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:38 pm

    “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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

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

30. Tony
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

    Looks like site is being spammed pretty badly…

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

37. heh
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

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

    Is this true?

38. Colin Dowling
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    Even dumber than Twitter.

41. Joe
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:51 pm

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

42. kent
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

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

43. kent
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

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

44. datter
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

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

45. Paul
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

    hint:

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

46. Alex Choo
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 5:41 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 6:46 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 7:31 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 7:32 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 7:39 pm

    @#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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 7:50 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 8:09 pm

    never underestimate the ability of your readers to smell BS…

53. patricia
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 8:59 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

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

57. Baron
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 9:14 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

    @#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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

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

    Mangina. Supporter of Feminism.

60. Mallik
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 10:09 pm

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

61. Drama 2.0
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 10:13 pm

    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
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 11:10 pm

    What a useless web site, why even cover it?

63. sonja
    

    May 15th, 2007 at 11:54 pm

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

64. Edwin Khodabakchian
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 12:06 am

    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
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 3:37 am

    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
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 7:44 am

    @ 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
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 7:53 am

    Yeah covered - with spa/\/\ . terrible

68. matthew
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 7:55 am

    that site can’t be for real. honestly.

69. Hari
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 8:06 am

    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
    

    May 16th, 2007 at 3:26 pm

    Baron, #57: +1

71. Ozh
    

    May 17th, 2007 at 2:58 am

    Mostest uselessest site everest.

72. LazyOnlineMoneyMaker
    

    May 17th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    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
    

    May 17th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

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

74. Gustav M
    

    June 9th, 2007 at 2:00 am

    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.