Last year Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors on the cheap (he spent $13,000), which is at least pointing the right way on Compete.com. Today he follows up with a sequel, AllTop. It’s a…well, it’s a RSS reader I guess. We actually wrote about this a month ago, but now it’s formal (the Chris Shipley quote cracks me up).
The home page lists a number of categories. Each links to a page that pulls in blog feeds. Here’s Venture Capital, for example. Kawasaki calls it an “online magazine rack,” and adds that it is “a news aggregation site that provides “all the top” stories for forty of the most popular topics on the Web. The headlines and first paragraph of the five most recent stories from forty to eighty sources for each topic are displayed. Alltop stories are refreshed approximately every ten minutes.”
So I sort of passed on criticizing Truemors since Kawasaki said it was more of an experiment in showing how something can be built for next to nothing. But AllTop is just a big pile of nothing. Back in 2005 Fred Oliveira, for example, built this site in about 5 minutes, which is pretty darn comparable to one of the AllTop categories. I’m giving this a big thumbs down. Sorry, Guy. I still love ya.
It’s a http://popurls.com ripp. That’s what it is.
LOL !!. You know you are wrong for that !
just goes to show you can be good at talking about start-ups, but not good at creating them.
wonder if he registered all the domains again. Because god knows you don’t want your brand diluted by some guy in Slovakia getting the same domain with the slovakia extension
Michael, your “we wrote about this” link is going to the Kawasaki post, not TC’s last Alltop review
It looks ok. It’s not mind-blowing or revolutionary in anyway.
what did Guy do again that makes him somewhat famous?
honestly. i built something similar for a friend that followed a sports team, it took me all of 5 minutes.
the only reason this is getting ANY attention is guy’s name.
I don’t know him personally – but based off of what I have read by him/seen in videos – Guy Kawasaki isn’t the smartest guy in the room and he’s not someone that I would say is really an idea man. However – what he does better than most is market (and twitter spam =) his sites out there and get them to appreciable readership.
I definitely agree with you here though Mike – this is not something that I would consider worthy of a writing other than the fact that Kawasaki is behind it. Netvibes/Pageflakes already does this better and PopUrls is already in place…
SAT review.
Paris Hilton is to Entertainment industry As Guy Kawasaki is to Startup community
P.S.I think he used to make motorcycles… just a guess
It’s actually not bad, so when you visit, go there with an open mind
How does this get deserve any attention?
$13,000 for this? Are you kidding? I hope most of that was towards the domain name (kidding) because I could’ve done this for $500. This is laughable at best.
you might be talking about this link Michael
http://www.tech...-has-a-big-ego/
Isn’t this just like OriginalSignal.com, which you guys covered a long time ago? At the time TechCrunch seemed to really like it: http://www.tech...th-big-changes/
… well I don’t think this was built to please us techies… think about mainstream users that STILL have no idea what an RSS feed is… this could actually be a good step to get them interested.
Not everything has to be a GREAT idea to be useful.
Just saying… (I would never use it…)
I helped provide some of the links for the autos section, but didn’t make it in the acknowledgments
I’m sure it’s fairly easy to make this site, but it’s a fairly good resource in the subjects that are done. Nothing revolutionary for sure though.
It does say “Inspired by popurls” at the top.
@damon – it doesn’t do anything special. it gets you feeds of sites that are pre-determined that you have no control over. it’s nothing that you couldn’t go setup with google reader or news gator.
personally i used simplepie and setup my own version on my site with feeds i give a shit about. it took me less than an hour to setup.
Very honest and truthful article. Emotionless and void effort of a website.
this is the most aweful “aggregator” without the choice of what you can aggregate I have ever seen *LOL* …. how could that even pass Guy’s BullSh*t test?
This reminds me of http://www.miniboxs.com.
It is still a little buggy and the design is horrible, but it’s also important to have sites like this one, as not everyone is using RSS readers, but they still want to read news. All the top news…
Target audience appears to be people who haven’t figured out how to use Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo, etc.
Guy is just a bit old for this game. For people his age an “online magazine rack” probably sounds appealing.
“I don’t know him personally – but based off of what I have read by him/seen in videos – Guy Kawasaki isn’t the smartest guy in the room and he’s not someone that I would say is really an idea man.”
Totally agree – I read some of his articles, interviews, and rants, and he just seems like any other person with marginal tech insight. It’s like scoble – I’m not sure how these guys get any semblance of authority in the tech world, but it’s best to just move along.
Yup – target audience isn’t TechCrunch geek/jerks, but people like my GF who don’t know what an RSS feed is, don’t want to use Google Reader and just want a place to find new information.
I bet this will do a lot better than the haters think.
This is similar to my site…except i don’t have sub-domains for each category.
I’ve been watching/reading Guy for a while, and I’m impressed with most of his content. But I must say after seeing this example that there is a great divide between his ideas about innovation and his execution.
If it’s for people who have not figured out My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc then it will be a failure. These people are better served by reading Google News and are not going to care about most of the predefined categories listed there.
Fail
I thought it was pretty helpful. Just like a magazine rack is helpful. It may not take rocket science to make, but it serves a need.
You need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Look at it from the standpoint of a consumer or a business person with little time and who don’t want to spend hours hunting for sites in various categories (even if they had time).
If it saves them time, they’ll love it.
Big businesses have been built on more modest foundations than this.
A lot of people in this space but if you start using it might actually suprise you how good it is. I use Originalsignal.com all the time and alltop is like that but covers some topics it does not.
Imagine that – a website not targeted at the techno-geeks! Try to keep a few words in mind when you look at http://www.alltop.com — “Know Your Audience” … and I think Guy nailed it. This website is GREAT for my Mom to look at and in 30 minutes get all the news, stories, personal blogs, whatever … that she could stand!!!
Oh yea – and he put my blog up there!
GO SHARKS!
when will people stop paying attention to this guy. Hes a loudmouth that knows nothing , that got lucky in life. Bury him with all the other net celebrities that aren’t celebrated for actually being smart.
haha slap some adsense ads and it becomes a MFA site rofl
I agree…nothing breath taking here. However, it does make it really easy to read through many posts quickly. My Google reader gets bogged down a lot and this might be an easy way to relieve yourself of the Google Reader stress.
I like it.
You get a snap view of all the “must view” blogs in the venture capital and start up world.
I built something similar to this about a year or so ago and got a ton of flack from people accusing me of scraping headlines and content, even though I emailed site owners and asked permission. Ended up shutting it down after a few months.
This makes me wonder about Guy’s credibility… Is he another wanna be 2.0 guy ??? I know he has a great background and everything but common… If you fund Startups and you make a living from anylizing them and talking about them, why can’t you make a decent one ????
I agree with some of the other posters, this is perfect for a certain target, all the top feeds in one place for review. Yes, for the geeks (everyone who even knows about TechCrunch) it’s nothing but 99% of the population doesn’t know TechCrunch or care.
Hilarious, if you visit AllTop and then visit PopUrls, they’ll provide a nice a little note:
hey alltop visitor!
great you found the genuine
I completely agree with Bill Brister. Everyone is always looking for the next revolutionary product or site. I agree that this is no better than Original Signal but it’s no worse either.
I think the site is really easy for non-tech folks. If you look at it from that perspective.. it’s a clean, well organized site that some one older than 23 years old and the attention span greater than a flea can use and appreciate.
L.
Shows that Guy is not a great investors, like Fred Wilson. He made a lot of money for himself on sending a condo in New York ..$35M …Great stuff
Guy is not a great investors, like Fred Wilson. He made a lot of money for himself on sending a condo in New York ..$35M …Great stuff
Although the idea is very simple, and I can see why it gets no respect from a tech perspective, it could succeed I suppose. I somehow think the design of this implementation will cause it to fail, as Im guessing a lot of the potential users of this site will be put off by the design. I thought I was immune to information overload but when I click on a topic my eyes just dart all over the page, so many results, but maybe thats just me.
And I did groan when I saw that vid of him where he was explaining the transparent banner graphic. Great, so he had people who didnt understand the bad pun and thought the graphics on the site were broken, but he thought it was better to keep the pun and never mind if it confused people.
A simple idea that thinks its being clever and ends up being neither?
The key point to remember here is that this isn’t a site for us; it’s for everyone else in the country who doesn’t know what an RSS reader is. I talked with Guy yesterday and he made a great point. If your mother wants an overview of news stories on green living, for example, are you going to tell her to set up a Google Reader account and add 50 feeds to it? Or are you going to send her to a site like Alltop? Guy’s not implying that he’s cracked the code of the universe here. He’s just trying to make news and blog reading easier for mass consumers.
And for anyone who’d like to read Chris Shipley’s take on it – http://tinyurl.com/2yfqsf.
Glad I could amuse you, Mike. (And nice to see you’re reading The Guidewire.)
If others want a chuckle, check out http://tinyurl.com/2yfqsf.
I agree that Alltop isn’t rocket science, but it IS useful. And I suspect a whole lot of people who live in the rest of the world will find it pretty useful, too.
Those who can, do. Those who cant, critique on Techcrunch.
Confucious say — Never take an offer for a shiitake mushroom pizza from Guy Kawasaki.
A business lacking any semblance of innovation (strategic or technical) must hype/market/buy its way to success. Clearly, Guy and other VCs will always employ these tactics but its tough sledding and rarely succesful.
Jeez, after seeing a lot of the stuff coming out in the web2.0 space lately, I’m thinking I should pull out a few of the 3 ring binders I have in the closet and repurpose some of the concepts and site ideas in there. Hmmmmm…
We’ve built a few of these aggregator sites and there’s a big problem: Google will not index them because of duplicate content issues. So, with no organic traffic you have to spend money to build a base, especially because his audience is ‘regular’ folks who won’t learn about it here.
Another issue is that he can’t use traditional PR to draw traffic as it is not in the general media’s interest to promote these kinds of el cheapo, other people’s (work) content sites.
Silly, IMHO
Sometimes, you really do get what you paid for.
Outsourcing almost everything to the lowest bidders can actually kill your startup before it ever starts.