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February 8, 2008

Alltop Thinks My Boss Has a Big Ego

Mark Hendrickson

43 comments »

Guy Kawasaki has just launched a news aggregation site called Alltop that displays headlines from a preselected set of “top” sources. The headlines are broken into categories such as celebrities, gaming, and politics.

Which category displays headlines from our very own Michael Arrington’s personal blog CrunchNotes? Egos.

Now all of us around the office already knew Mike had a particular affection for himself, but we weren’t about to launch a website promoting that fact. Thanks for doing it for us, Guy.

Alltop gives homage to its inspiration, popurls, and serves as a kind of preconfigured Netvibes except only for RSS feeds. I wonder, however, why there’s no technology category. We found the site via Brian Solis.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Analysis on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop launch: A Gimmick Site with Marketing Flair

    February 12th, 2008 at 12:58 pm

  2. I’m Stealing Your Ideas… » Expert Idiot

    February 17th, 2008 at 11:17 pm

  3. Pleasure and Pain — Design.alltop.com

    March 1st, 2008 at 10:18 pm

Comments

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  1. Rm

    February 8th, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Does Guy Kawasaki ever make anything happen or good, I always just here him talk about startups, but nothing good at least recently.?

  2. Mike Rundle

    February 8th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

    I guess if you can’t think up good ideas, you just steal them from popurls and Web 2.0 Workgroup.

  3. Larry Larrikin

    February 8th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

    Guy is throwing a bunch of $5k projects into the tubes and hoping something will stick. Luckily his name gives him free PR.

  4. Steve

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

    Both truemors and alltop seem to be little more then slight variations of already existing sites that add little not value and only get any attention thanks to Guy’s prominence as a Venture Cap blogger.

  5. Faramarz

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

    3 times i tried and and all three times click on any category crashed my firefox.

    :(

  6. LOL

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

    When has Guy Kawasaki come out with anything useful?

    Dude is a dork.

  7. Amanda

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    Well he also puts himself under “Ego’s”, but I do think it’s odd that there’s no technology section.

  8. LOL

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    @ Larry…

    Too bad his name is already trademarked by a SUCCESSFUL company!

  9. Darren Stuart

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:17 pm

    mmmmm this is just original signals but not as good. I can’t say much I cloned OS for my motorracing rss thingy (singleseaterracing.com).

  10. dave

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:25 pm

    what a dumb ass idea. people are using readers and create this kind of crap on their own…dumb.

  11. Marzipan from Toledo

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:33 pm

    this will soon be migrated to Guy’s most famous web property — ALL FLOP

    … and they need to invest in a caching appliance or something to make this scale …

  12. Greg

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    I rather use something like newznozzl, that does something like this but then adds new value (voting and wiki)

  13. Jeff the Great

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    with Trumors and AllTop, kinda makes me wonder how the heck Guy became a trusted VC?

    I feel bad for all the entrepreneurs that were told “no” by Guy cause their idea wasn’t good enough. Obviously Guy has poor judgement.

  14. P-Air

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    sounds an aweful lot like originalsignal.com, which is how I get to this blog each day.

  15. Robin Wauters

    February 8th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    2 commenters beat me to this, but I’m still gonna say it :)

    AllTops looks and feels a lot more like http://originalsignal.com than it does like popurls.

    I for one see the value, I use both Netvibes and OriginalSignal to serve as content aggregator.

  16. Guy Kawasaki

    February 8th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    The reason there is no Tech topic is that we respect what popurls has done and do not want to compete with our friend Thomas Marban. I realize this is a difficult concept for many TC readers to grasp.

  17. alan p

    February 8th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    Good luck, but the issue is that the existing good enoughs are, well….good enough.

  18. Ashok

    February 8th, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    “I realize this is a difficult concept for many TC readers to grasp” LOL. Mark, you gonna let him talk to your users that way?

  19. Larry Larrikin

    February 8th, 2008 at 6:45 pm

    Re: Guy’s comment:
    So they don’t want to hurt the competition. This is clearly not a serious product/company so what the hell is it doing on TC? There are REAL companies out there that would love a little attention.

  20. Drue Kataoka

    February 8th, 2008 at 9:04 pm

    Yesterday I interviewed Guy Kawasaki about Alltop.
    Here’s the video of his very engaging interview discussing
    Alltop, Zen, the Apple aesthetics of the design, and the Egos category:

    http://www.valleyzen.com/2008/.....ing-today/

  21. Not Edible

    February 8th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

    @9: What kind of creepy site is this ? Singles Eater Racing.com ? Some kind of twist on the hot dog eating competition, or a competition for cannibalistic pick-up guys ?

  22. Blake Robinson

    February 8th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

    Seriously? Judging by the list of people under Alltop “egos,” it’s pretty safe to say that it’s using the word to refer to individuals and not an inflated sense of self-worth. It’s synonymous with person and character in addition to the whole self-love thing.

  23. Pete

    February 9th, 2008 at 12:43 am

    Look at http://popurls.net , they’re clearly onto something bigger than alltop.

  24. Darren Stuart

    February 9th, 2008 at 3:12 am

    @Guy did you never come across Original Signals when doing this site. Its pretty well known. Also I would of done tech because I don’t think you will be competing with popurls as there are plenty of sites out there doing this.

  25. Darren Stuart

    February 9th, 2008 at 3:14 am

    @21 LOL, I was never happy with the URL but I had never read it that way :p

  26. Thomas

    February 9th, 2008 at 4:37 am

    popurls’s not really about tech, it’s more like holistic web zeitgeist, right?

  27. Mark Evans

    February 9th, 2008 at 5:00 am

    With all due respect to Kawasaki, I’m puzzled why AllTop was launched. It’s not like there’s a crying need for it, or that it’s all innovative or unique. It seems like one of these we-can-build-it-for-cheap so let’s launch it kind of projects. Is there any value in doing this kind of thing? I don’t think so.

  28. Eric Dewhirst

    February 9th, 2008 at 6:44 am

    Man - what a bunch of whiners!

    Seriously for all the complaints and dissing it smacks a lot like “man I wish I thought of that” going around. Yeah it looks like popurls but it just takes it to the next level and they give credit. Oh and before you go wah wah they stole this and that and I could role my own - whatever you didn’t and all the sites people have referenced above are just digg aggregator clones. Nope bottom line it is about a new way of of cleanly looking at what’s out there - sometimes presentation is the secret sauce.

    I like it - you go in and the layout is super clean - navigation is intuitive - allows you to scan quickly over a ton of topics and not feel like you are being overwhelmed. You go beyond subject/linkbait by being able to hover over the article to get an idea if it is worth reading - it is sweet.

    The only thing that jumped out was how it would integrate advertising and still keep it’s super clean aesthetic feel - if they can do that then I think they have something sustainable and worth using.

    Cheers - Eric
    Ohh yeah one last point - for once a URL that you can tell someone and not look like a tool - alltop.com - what do they do? all the top stories - ahhhh

  29. Rahul Dighe

    February 9th, 2008 at 8:03 am

    in my opinion it doesn’t take a revolutionary technology to build something like this the UI is certainly clean and fresh if it catches on great if it doesn’t i don’t believe anyone is losing millions over this !! its certainly worth a shot.

  30. CanCar

    February 9th, 2008 at 8:16 am

    It does look a little unfair. If he’s given Mac a separate section, then why did he hesitate in giving technology and science two different pages?
    The news sources that Alltop uses are quite good content wise.

  31. Sonny Gill

    February 9th, 2008 at 8:19 am

    For everyone that’s complaining about how similar Alltop is to other sites (popurls etc.) then watch the interview with him and Drue Kataoka on the newly launched site:

    http://www.valleyzen.com/2008/.....ing-today/

    I feel the simplicity of it makes for a welcoming feeling and an easy to grasp aggregation site, vs. what’s out there right now. Not to mention it touches upon 9 different niches and then broken down even further. Equates to less clutter.

  32. Jonah

    February 9th, 2008 at 8:27 am

    Digesty.com does the same thing for food feeds.

  33. rubu

    February 9th, 2008 at 8:54 am

    I like it - you go in and the layout is super clean - navigation is intuitive - allows you to scan quickly over a ton of topics and not feel like you are being overwhelmed. You go beyond subject/linkbait by being able to hover over the article to get an idea if it is worth reading - it is sweet.

  34. thomas

    February 9th, 2008 at 9:11 am

    from the thousands of folks that step by every day i get lots of feedback from users who haven’t even heard of digg or reddit but signed up after discovering these sites on popurls. i don’t think guy’s selling alltop as the next big thing and if you start the discussion on the feedreader/tech level you’ve missed the idea behind those projects. i could have built an ego, sports, politics and any other mumbo jumbo topic subsite from day one but i rather focused on bringing the web’s zeitgeist to every device and platform (see popurls.net). and that’s just one example - i think there’s plenty of space to educate people what’s cool out there and as long as you ship something remarkable with heart & soul it’s just fine. just don’t think too elite; we’re not all dave winer scholars.

  35. Mike

    February 9th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Adding NewsSnacks to the list- http://news.spotback.com/newssnacks/ which also has a “Tech News” preconfigured section at http://news.spotback.com/newssnacks/technews and “Web 2.0″ section at http://news.spotback.com/newssnacks/web2.0

  36. bhc3

    February 9th, 2008 at 10:48 pm

    Guy sent out a tweet looking for top websites for sports. I tweeted LetsRun.com, but alas no RSS there. Now I understand why he asked.

    Interesting site. I don’t know about popurls or Original Signals. But at first blush, this seems like something I could create on my own with an RSS reader.

    The real value, I suppose, would be in the way in which Guy manages who is included on the list of “top sources”. If inclusion on that list becomes important and it gets picked up amongst the blogosphere, then this could become something. That’s a big ‘if’ though.

    I do like the visual layout of stories. My own visual Techmeme of top stories as I scan the headlines.

    Guy - I don’t know what you’re running, but I keep getting some “Unresponsive script” warning in my Firefox browser.

  37. j31

    February 10th, 2008 at 10:32 am

    I think I could safely categorize myself into the 95th percentile of the population who does not rely on an RSS reader for content… a site like alltop is a completely refreshing and efficient way for me to glance at all of the top stories without getting lost and irritated in a clutter of god-awful, horrendous design and advertising. Not to mention the time I save populating or even navigating around a feed-reader.

    I for one will not be a regular rss-user until someone can invent a method for it to feel and function more like alltop.

    http://originalsignal.com? not a fan. I lasted one second on that site, before it pulled my shirt over my head and punched me in the gut. Perhaps the content is good? I wouldn’t know - the layout did not entice me to stay. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got the ‘feel’ of clean…but I cannot possibly imagine it reaches the full audience that it should.

    I might also add, if the goal of alltop is such that any end-user would be able to utilize it (most of the population), my own mother gives it the seal of approval. (and that’s saying something) And if it passes the ‘mother-as-end-user’ test… you can be relatively sure it will speak to a wide sector. It’s not just tech-geeks who use the internet.

  38. Alex

    February 10th, 2008 at 5:46 pm

    http://tiinker.com is in a similar market but add automatic personalisation. It learns what you like reading and filters/explores for you.

  39. nickie

    February 14th, 2008 at 4:11 am

    From all news aggregators i prefer http://needfornews.com
    they give tag cloud, so you dont need to read all titles to understand wtf s going today

  40. thomas

    March 6th, 2008 at 10:10 am

    my two cents: http://tomatic.com/s/popurls-vs-alltop

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