Guy Kawasaki Formally Launches Alltop. Wow, It’s Bad.

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.techcrunch.com/2008.....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.techcrunch.com/2006.....g-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.

Just finished listening to the interview with Guy that Dave Winer posted.

He said exactly what many of you have commented on…most people out there don’t understand RSS or how to implement it…this is just a way for the non-techies to follow some of the top bloggers in a variety of categories.

Also, regarding popurl…he acknowledged that it is a rip-off of that site. He also said that he checked with them specifically regarding their intent to go beyond tech news. When they said they didn’t intend to expand their product, he asked if it would be alright with them if he did it.

Contrary to many of you, I’d say Guy is a pretty smart fellow. He is building for an audience that is far, far bigger than the technophile echo chamber.

Mr. Arrington I thought you would recognize the beauty (and money) in a large audience. I don’t see this as philosophically all that different from Mahalo. Cater to the large, non-sophisticated group, not the small-savvy one.

Guy Kawasaki is a premiere self-promoter and attentionwhore. He’s built a guru identity for himself based solely on the fact that he joined Apple as a Johnny-Come-Lately and stayed there a few years as a mediocre employee. If you listen to him now, you’d think that he founded the company alongside The Two Steves. Since then everything he’s done has been a mediocrity from garage.com to his books to his various products. Yet he knows how to play the media like a fiddle.

Congrats, TechCrunch commentariat, for showing that the poseurs really do outnumber the geeks in the Valley these days. Guy Kawasaki is the former “Mac Evangelist” at Apple responsible for millions adopting the platform back in the 1980s. After John Sculley’s reign of terror, he went with Steve Jobs to perform a similar job at NeXT, but… well, there wasn’t much to evangelize there.

That of course has nothing to do with this product, which is one of the most pointless websites I’ve ever seen, but you could at least *pretend* to know this kind of stuff, couldn’t you? A 12 year old faking his love of punk rock at least knows how to do that.

It’s not too bad. Great way to find great news feed sites topically. I can see a visit from time to time to get tastes of info from the sources not in my rss reader.

“Inspired by popurls” should read “Direct copy of OriginalSignal.com.”

Mike,

Let me get this straight: You rip off Dick Sheaffer’s Venturewire and Chris Shipley’s DEMO with TechCrunch and TC 40, and you’re ragging on Guy?

Can you be any more hypocritical?

Maybe Guy did this to take the heat off Eliot Spitzer who took the heat off Sara Lacey.

I think it’s useful for those people who aren’t aware of or know how to use feed readers or know where to get a lot of this information from, in a concise one-stop form.

Everyone who’s hating and thinks they can create something in 5 minutes, then do it. If you had the following that Guy has, why not try out an aggregater like Alltop. Its certainly not a bad idea like the self-proclaimed experts here are saying.

Eh … I think this is perfect for the audience it is meant to serve. Many of my clients are not as tech-savy as TC readers. I like the simplicity, and that it has things on it that are not sites I picked … makes me expand my horizons.

And FWIW … I laughed at 2 Truemors stories in the past 24 hours. That’s worth $13K to me! (Hey, it wasn’t my money ….)

PS - This is just what he wants, and you know that right? It’s one of those “Guy Kawasaki” things that really stuck with me - “Polarize people” he says. You can’t have people who love you without having people who hate you!

what is a magazine rack?

I’d say for criticisms that it’s certainly lacking the something that tells me “with this site I can maybe do something useful with all these feeds”.

I certainly found tons of stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise though through my feeds. So there’s something to be said for that.

@edward printer: yeah, that’s what I thought. Exactly like Original Signal. I do love Original Signal.

I don’t much about the Alltop website but Guy. Please stop spamming the @guykawaski Twitter feed! You’re a really smart guy and I care a lot about what you have to say. How about setting up an @alltop feed if you haven’t already???

Post #51 Geoff - Well said.

Guy deserves more credit than what Arrington has said here above. It’s not too late to retract or edit Michael!

Agreed with those who say it’s not bad. But I think it will need an intermediate grouping layer to be useful for most people. As it is, you go from a home page where you can’t find certain expected categories (financial news) to pages with way too many links.

oh I see the post is up once again..

Nice going Mike , you gotta be yourself. Calling Alltops , as nothing big, is OK !!

I for one was one of the early users of ALLTOP, for a die hard geek tis difficult to adopt the landing page. However, the page does have value for the 95% of users who dont use RSS radear as a natural everyday tool.

The issue, that I am seeing with ALLTOP is that it dependent on human aggregation to keep the top blogs getting piped into it. So this becomes labor intensive to keep links up2 date and fresh

I could see using one of these as my homepage, personally though I would prefer the option of being able to sign up for an account and create my own page based off their suggestions here and maybe having the ability to add my own RSS feeds from other websites as well.

Then, I don’t just have to read the tech news on one page and the SEO stuff on another page, I can put them together and re-order them however I want. Once enough users have joined suggested sites can be thrown at members based on people with similar combinations.

It’s an interesting start though, it will be nice to see if this evolves into something more dynamic over time…

I am a UI/UX professional — that’s what I do. Now, to all you haters — stop with the sour grapes. IT IS simple, IT IS easy, IT IS something ANY of us could have coded. SOUR GRAPES.

I ditched my RSS reader for this site. I know longer need to have a 3rd party application tell me what the news is, when I can make alltop.com my homepage, skim, get my news, and off to what I was doing before. SIMPLE, EASY, FAST INFORMATION.

Bravo, Guy.

michael, i know this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this, but…

you’re an idiot.

What’s with the banner in the middle of the page? Maybe the site could work for someone. Maybe they have customization on the way. BUT MOVE THE FREAKING BANNER

@damon h. - LOL it’s his twitter account, he can do whatever he wants!

I think Guy is on to something when it comes to the mass audience.

We actually take a more “human editor” approach because that’s what the masses want, hand picked. Yes, it’s more labor intensive than fully automated but whether RSS or Alltop, I don’t think the general population is making the jump to fully automated any time soon. Not until sites like Alltop become truly intelligent in deciphering a user’s preferences.

Here’s what we’re doing for politics, our first site, http://www.primetimepolitics.com

Human editor assisted by today’s freely available technologies, that’s our opinion anyway.

@BannerBoy - The banner is part of the design. The site is called alltop and the banner sits on top of the content… and it says “we have _______ covered”

It was meant to be semi-clever. Even if you don’t find it amusing, is it really that difficult to scroll down a line?

I think people here are really missing the point. I’m a complete info junkie, and I use a combination of NetNewsWire, NetVibes, and Alltop.

Alltop is great when you want to go somewhere for a source of new information whereas I use NetVibes for sites I check on a regular basis. I think it’s great that Alltop goes against the mold of UGC sites and offers the convenience of RSS to the masses.

I surround myself with a majority of non-tech people, non of whom have ever heard of RSS or NetVibes and the like. They will never bother to aggregate their own feeds or build their own page.

Plus most of the other sites are specific to one topic, whereas Alltop includes a wide variety. And it’s been collected by people who matter - lead users via Twitter.

Personally, I don’t think it matters that it has been done before- first mover advantage is over-rated - it’s the execution that will make Alltop stand out from the other mass of single feed aggregators.

Looks at godaddy (or whatever) list:
“So, what do I do with alltop.com? Shit I know I’ll make something about ‘all’ the ‘top’ news! How great is that? Okay next, boollshit.com, I know, I’ll make something about…” etc

Just want to add, that comments which are personal attacks on Guy, rather than critiques of Alltop are a surefire way to rapidly lose credibility.

Actually this is a pretty useful site from a user experience point of view. The mouse-over previews are quick and useful-much more than those found on myYahoo page.

In terms of the content organization, nothing ground-breaking but think of all the non-techies out there who are literally drowning in information overload…

Seriously dude. This is the kinda post Guy would have wanted for the launch. Something that sends traffic his way. If you really wanted to give thumbs down, you should have ignored the launch altogether.

For all the people hating out there, I Think that Guy came out of this day a success in his mind with all the Pub he got. Why hate on these sites? Their useful and I dont have to worry about maintaining such a list in my personal reader..

I check out

sportsnipe.com for sports
popurls.com for social
web20.originalsignal.com for web20

all great sites, just cause they are simple does not make them stupid!

Just make a My Yahoo page and share it with your friends.

Venture Capital (30s build):
http://cm.my.yahoo.com/add/pag.....c49fbe4774

I had a quick look at Alltop and I just re-realized that the box-model of displaying news simply doesn’t work. Look at it, its got 3 columns of headlines in little boxes. It is not convenient to scan through the headlines from left to right. Netvibes, Pageflakes make this same mistake.

I love Guy Kawasaki and swear by his book (Art of the Start), but this doesn’t cut it. When the page loads, where is the user supposed to look ?

I’m one of the geeks behind Alertle and frankly it is the only feed reader out there with a remarkably different, fresh and simple interface (http://www.alertle.com). Apart from that the choice is between a boxes model and a email-like model. Check out its 2 mt demo on YouTube and you might agree with me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztQJ4ec1aWs

I had a quick look at Alltop and I just re-realized that the box-model of displaying news simply doesn’t work. Look at it, its got 3 columns of headlines in little boxes. It is not convenient to scan through the headlines from left to right. Netvibes, Pageflakes make this same mistake.

I love Guy Kawasaki and swear by his book (Art of the Start), but this doesn’t cut it. When the page loads, where is the user supposed to look ?

I’m one of the geeks behind Alertle and frankly it is the only feed reader out there with a remarkably different, fresh and simple interface. Apart from that the choice is between a boxes model and a email-like model. Check out its 2 mt demo on YouTube and you might agree with me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztQJ4ec1aWs

hahaha… haven’t laughed at a headline in a while…

#80 - exactly ! ….. between a public netvibes page, yahoo mypage, and the pageflakes “page casting” …. Anyone can build an “alltops” - with a much nicer user interface…. these things are a dime a dozen

You know what, the idea is ridiculously non innovative but I like it because there is nothing to setup. It does remind me a bit of a magazine rack, you don’t get to pick and choose the magazines but who cares you just stop by and see what they have, and those are the popular most widely read ones, so it’s all good.

I agree with #25 and the others who pointed out that Alltop is something that will be great for people who don’t use RSS readers or care to setup a MyYahoo, MyMSN, iGoogle or any other feed reader type custom pages.

Believe it or not, even though TC has over 600K subscribers, there are millions of Internet users in the US alone who aren’t TC readers and simply want to find current information quickly. This product appears to be aptly suited for those people.

Guy’s description made it sound like a TechMeme for everything which would be a great application, but I’m impressed with Alltop either. It’s uncomfortable to navigate and it’s not really clear how it is ranking things if it is even doing that effectively.

Forgive them, Guy, for they know not what they say. Obviously, these guys don’t know their history. You all have no idea what Guy Kawasaki did for Apple back in the day.

I know what you’re trying to do Guy.

Keep the faith.

We looked at this site this week on the podcast and from then to now it has completely changed. The look is totally different!

It did look better and there was a lot more categories listed as well as favicons next to each… not sure if that makes it better or not - but aesthetically it looked a hell of a lot better.

Compare this screenshot:

http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/n.....lltop/3889

With what you see now. Granted it is small but it is enough to see that the site has drastically changed for the worse. Geeze. What did they do that for?

Chris Shipley - you guys have a site? I just saw the quote on Guy’s post. Now, if this cost $10k to build, do you give them a discount off the normal $18k to present at Demo?

I found this site useful. I was trying to find sites that primarily discuss independent businesses and I found http://smallbusiness.alltop.com/. Rather than importing all the feeds into my Pageflakes, I just check the alltop.com page daily (along with my Pageflakes and Technorati favs).

I’m don’t mind the mag rack analogy. I don’t think it means he’s too old for this business. True experts can draw analogies so any audience can fully understand.

I don’t get it, what exactly is it for? Tell me its just more then feeds please!

drupal has had this kind of aggregator display option available for years, what’s the news? is guy just asking us to look at his homepage?

honestly, is this even a “startup” worth covering or some bullshit web page put up by a friend of yours? it’s just about as good as ’searchme’ from earlier today - also a copy of something firefox plugins have done for ages…who gives a shit?

…write about REAL COMPANIES please! that would be great. otherwise, just put up a section dedicated to bullshit hosted on .mac, new pligg installations, exciting new wordpress blogs and so on…yawn.

We should really stick it to Guy. Why don’t we show him what can be done in 30 minutes instead of $10,000. Let’s build a clone. He hasn’t done travel.alltop.com. Let’s find 60 good feeds and build a Alltop copy.

Then maybe Michael will announce it here? What say you guys? You’re obviously really talented and insightful. Let’s show Guy how clueless he is! Any takers? What’s 30 minutes compared to glory of sticking it to this blowhard?

Not to mention the fact that the feeds within a category site are poorly chosen.

“the chris shipley quote cracks me up”

ha. YOU crack me up. could it be because shipley runs a conference that you compete with? LOL.

this website is about as good as one of Guy’s books…awful!

If the supposed target market can’t work an RSS reader, there is no way they have the screen viewing sophistication to be able to process that many headlines. The mass audience doesn’t even care for multiple sources, they’re generally just happy to trust the online version of their local newspaper.

Wow. Lots of haters. The site’s not bad at all, and popurls.com, which he modeled it off of, is getting huge traffic now. It’s not meant to be some huge company, just a nice traffic generator that he can point wherever he’d like. Of the 98 comments before me, I’ll bet maybe 3 people could actually follow through with a concept and launch it - the rest will tell you how it’s stupid, copied, easy to replicate - not one of those people would be worth hiring for any job.

I think the problem is that this comes from the guy who speaks about “the next curve”, “be innovative” and “have a clear monetization”.

Looks like a parked domain

Why is that on TC?Why is he on TC? Why are we talking of Him?! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

So many negative reviews.. tsk.. tsk..

Guy is a genius. Alltop.com is the most impressive adsense splog site I have ever seen. Talk about clear monetization, take the top 40 topics on the web, stick them onto a single page and advertise all over it.

Not sure about innovative, a few hundred people with sites like that link to my blog every day.

-Vlad

Guy … building an online web application is much more difficult than you think. It’s far more difficult than selling books. I do realize you are very good at writing books. But it doesn’t mean you’ll be successful easily by selling your next web app.

Sorry folks. Wake up! Guy Kawasaki IS NOT that good.

Michael Arrington seemed to be the HATER among the TechCrunch editors. Maybe he should ask himself: WHY?

I think Michael needs a lot of love from us!

Michael full well knows that Alltop is meant for a different audience than many of the products and sites that are reviewed on TechCrunch. So knowing in his heart that the site works great for its intended audience he creates “controversy” by saying the site is awful etc.

(Controversy by picking a fight with Guy Kawasaki is becoming pretty standard in the Blogosphere lately…sure worked for Jeremiah Owyang a couple of weeks ago http://www.web-strategist.com/.....p;sbutt=Go)

Michael you are better than this man. Really many of us made TechCrunch required reading over the years due to your insight on the industry. Please get back to writing articles like you did in the old days.

Guy, don’t take Michael’s bait (and respond to his post) keep on with what you are doing as you see the big picture (which is more than about focusing on tech geeks) with the internet and I think Alltop will work well for your intended audience.

Also…Guy Kawasaki was the one invited to interview Steve Ballmer last week at Mix…Not Arrington…wonder if there is a bit of envy in Silicon Valley about who the real powerbroker is:)

I see double value in this venture. First, an excellent place to show ads.

Second, assuming
the list of authoritative sites per subject are edited/updated regularly to remain authoritative, given time an excellent platform can be created for making a vertical search engine on all these subjects. Taking the concept one step further, a database/corpus of texts per subject is created that can be used to more efficiently train automated systems, eg in order to create compartmentalised semantic (sub)web(s). Does this sound feasible to you guys?

The site has several positive featues: 1) dense content FREE of advertising and 2) no annoying videos with commercials, and 3) speed - one of the fastest sites to deliver content via my Verizon EVDO modem, which is not a racehorse. I found some news I had missed. Guy does not have to tell everyone his revenue model, so I believe he knows something we don’t. Clever Guy. Other than the irritating red bar, I like the site and will use it. Thanks for reviewing it! Good Luck, Guy!

The fundamental flaw of you Silicon Valley people is that you live in your own little sphere and you forget the rest of the markets out there. This is something my mom would be interested in. Not me, not you all. That said, the site does not deserve writeups on blogs like this; it’s only getting attention because of its founder.

“It’s only getting attention because of its founder”

So what?

I liked the Alltop because it was clean and dirt simple and just easier to use than Google Reader and other sites. But I couldn’t figure out immediately how to customize it, which is what anyone would want.

Since when it Mahalo catering to large and sophisticated? Because they tack on a Brittany store at the top over bunches of categories about inside tekkie and Valley stuff like Lolcats and SXSW and Obama?

Most of you are blowhards. You should read this:

http://tinyurl.com/yqd3ft

When will we see what you mama’s boys can do per comment #94?

yeah, up until now I used My Yahoo to do this. And if alltop does it for me, why shouldn’t I use it instead. The coverage is impressive. Some folks here (as others pointed out already) don’t want to believe that majority of the web surfers have no clue about RSS feeds.

I would have been impressed greatly if it was a better ripped of http://httpasia.com/

Still, lots of potential…

Speaking of marketing search engines, here are 40 (!) specialized Google engines built on Alltop categories …

http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/topmore.html

I like the site though. Simple and direct to the point.

Is this a “Guy Kawasaki” smear campaign or a review of a website?

I don’t see many useful comments, but I see a lot of people talking about someone they don’t personally know…

I interviewed Guy Kawasaki before he launched Alltop and got a preview of it. If you are new in the blogopshere, Alltop is a great place to find inspiration.

If you don’t know which twitterers to follow, Alltop can help you there too.

As someone mentions, Alltop is a fine service for those that doesn’t know how to use a RSS-reader or for those that are too lazy to spend a lot of time looking for topics that interest them.

Just found strong twitterers in http://twitter.alltop.com/.Nice.

My visitors from Alltop (I’m in the education section, BlogHighEd) are staying on my site much longer and are viewing twice as much content as others do. They seem to be a very engaged and ready to learn audience. Like people are saying, it’s a great place to get started and perfect for those who don’t know what RSS is. Face it, we (the readers of TechCrunch, etc.) are in the minority when it comes to web knowledge. My mom can use Alltop, and she does.

Michael’s right. That’s why we need smart aggregators that don’t show everything but only what’s important. Take a look at nobosh.com for an example which covers business & technology sources. nobosh filters out the bad articles (bosh), efficiently only showing users the no non-sense (nobosh).