Alltop, the “online magazine rack” that offers visitors a clean overview of RSS-feed enabled sources categorized by topic, is launching version 3.0 today with the addition of a custom feed reader that’s supposed to make it easier for users to personalize their user experience when browsing for online news. But how personalized is it really?
The feature, dubbed MyAlltop, lets users create a custom page with a so-called vanity URL (e.g. my.alltop.com/techcrunch) where they can add feeds from a variety of topics and display all the widgets on one page, which can then be shared with others. All users need to do is register and add feeds to their public pages by clicking a small plus sign displayed next to feed widgets.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc. have been around for years, and they pretty much all offer the above and much more. MyAlltop only lets you grab feeds that are already on Alltop, so no custom widgets for you (tough luck if you wanted to insert your mom’s blog). Furthermore, Alltop doesn’t have a decent search function, which makes it very hard to look for sources to add unless I’m 100% certain they will be in a specific category. With 31,000 sources in 550 topics, they’re hurting themselves not to make search a priority instead of launching new features like MyAlltop.
For example, I can’t find our sister site MobileCrunch anywhere on Alltop (not even in the Mobile category), so that pretty much blocks me from creating a public TechCrunch presence on Alltop with all our feeds in it. All I could do at this point is notify Alltop that there’s a great resource on all things mobile missing in the pre-defined category list of feeds and hope that they add it. Personalization it ain’t.
You could of course claim that Alltop takes the hassle out of having to locate the RSS feeds of your favorite sources and go through a few steps in order to add them to any personalized feed reader, but how much of a problem is this really? I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim MyAlltop simplifies creating a custom feed reader because it already has been dead simple for many years. In my opinion, anyone who thinks the process of personalizing your RSS feed reading experience with Netvibes or iGoogle is cumbersome will probably feel the same way after trying MyAlltop.
Here’s a video about Alltop (the new feature is explained a bit in the end):
How lame is that? popurls FTW!
Perhaps Guy should stick to what he’s good at…writing books and giving speeches about things he aspires to do successfully.
Great for people who don’t know what RSS is. I predict this market will shrink exponentially and Alltop will merely help push itself out of business.
As soon as people get the hang of how it works they will UPGRADE to Netvibes, iGoogle etc…
Perhaps they can capture the market and evolve quickly, but we shall see…
Good luck either way!
Great design!
Zach
Wow, I completely disagree with you, Robin. The problem with Alltop before was you had to go from page-to-page to look for your favorite content. Now you can “personalize” your very own Alltop page with everything you want.
Never mind it’s not a new technology. It’s what Alltop needed. I’m loving it!
I’m not criticizing because it’s not new technology, and I’m sure this benefits hardcore Alltop users.
But I fail to see how it “takes the complexity” out of setting up a custom feed reader, like some are claiming.
This is something my mom could use, because it’s a “walled garden” sort of approach. Giving you all the components and just letting you tinker with them, instead of the ‘blank canvas’ approach of other tools (which most power users understand, but many other people don’t). This may be a good ‘on ramp’ to understanding feed readers in general that people get started with, then abandon for more powerful tools (assuming alltop doesn’t morph in to something more powerful later). This is more like a custom ‘feed reader’ then a ‘custom feed’ reader, if that makes any sense (at least, imho)
See, I don’t buy that. How much harder is it to teach your mom to click the RSS button instead of the plus sign? And how could restricting her from following blogs from e.g. your relatives (unless they’re on Alltop) possibly be a good thing?
I can’t seem to reply to Robin directly, but I can say that she’s never had to demonstrate RSS to my mom. Showing people RSS preconfigured with real stuff in it is much easier than the ‘blank canvas’ – they get a sense of the purpose and benefits with ‘real’ stories immediately.
I’m with you on this, Michael.. It *is* like a “walled”, first step into feeds where people can play and feel like they aren’t going to hurt anything..
*Am* having trouble getting around it cognitively, though.. Seem to find myself constantly bouncing between pages before finally ending up where I need or wish to be.. Once I figure out why, that ever elusive dadburn “why”, I’ll pass it on to them..
As to not finding this or that blog on there, there is a subscription option of some kind, think it’s at the bottom, that allows people to submit blogs and RSS providing websites to Alltop, including suggestion of the appropriate category..
Alltop is from a usability point of View a nightmare. User experience could be better. You have to be a geek to spent some times there, I’ve try it, no way, I’ve then tried popurls, interesting but could be better, still for geeks, I then discover originalsignal.com, the best user experience and that’s my daily digest. As I’m looking for more now, I just decide to build my own, better user experience, killer functions, less contain and mainstream focus. I’m in alpha stadium now, you will hear from it and will love it. My mom will be able to use it, and will love it. Techcrunch, Mashable, RWW will all love it….hhhhmmm, I mean I hope so, but believe me you will.
Why does Guy do zero QA on the included sites? Basically, if you schmooze him on twitter, you’re in.
I think I’ll stick with my Feedly
I just use Feedly in Firefox. That is single-handedly the best solution i have found, and it integrates very well with Google Reader
I’m not quite sure I get this either. I would have thought that they would be creating aggregator sites around particular topics much like Topic Hubs instead of making it on a personal basis.
Are people going to adopt this as their new start page? Why have everything public? I can’t imagine that any of the examples are people who are not RSS readers. So what do I get by using it? This must be on a trajectory towards something else.
AllTop is great… if you’re an idiot and have no clue how to find great content. The “Walled Garden” approach sounds a lot like AOL back in the day – hmmm, that worked out well, eh?!
Quite frankly, were it not for Guy Kawasaki mercilessly spamming Twitter with AllTop crud for months, I might have at least been interested in giving AllTop a little slack in the “lack of customization” area. But it’s clear with AllTop that you read what Guy reads, or you don’t read at all.
AllTop is step backward, in my opinion.
Alltop seems to be sth. like Yahoo in the beginning: Manual directory of RSS Feeds….wow…
I think theire problem is the lack of tech. Hightech. Search: Hightech. Directory of RSS: Manual. Targeted/Autocustomized Homepage: Hightech. Selfcustomizing of Homepage: Manual.
I doubt approaches like this will survive in a massmarket in google-hightech times.
Cheers,
Nils
Alltop has “hardcore” users?
Yes, Guy Kawasaki and the other founders. JK
I used to dislike GK in a profound way, but ever since *Crunch jumped on his a** it’s hard not to feel sorry for the guy.
Why’s that? Cause he’s actually doing big things, unlike you? Easy to diss on successful people, huh?
But but but it’s from Guy Kawasaki, aren’t we obligated to like it?
Netvibes is better.
I couldn’t agree more with Robin.
And in addition:
Nobody would care two hoots about it if Guy Kawasaki wasn’t one of the founders.
Guy kawasaki has not been successful to date as a web entrepreneur so why would anyone care what he does?
Despite GK support, it’s too little, too late.
Legitimate feedback is one thing. I enjoyed the article and the posted video, which I might otherwise never have seen. But the comments, yeesh, so much animosity for Guy, I don’t get it.
My mom taught me that it’s the unsuccessful person who thinks he needs to tear down a successful person. McCain vs Obama, perfect example. As Obama ascended, McCain descended to new depths of bogus and unsupportable arguments, just to undermine his opponent because he himself had no place to stand. This pattern repeats through history.
BTW, Guy rocks, he’s done great things for the Mac community, his books are interesting to read, and he IS a successful entrepreneur. You who attack him, what have you contributed to anyone’s life, to a community, to the betterment of the world? I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing you would back off, behave better, get over yourself.
Alltop has it’s place and, frankly, lots of us love it.
I couldn’t agree more with this I just use only use ie
This is a complete waste of money and time.
For the fun of it, my friend did something similar for under $50. This is not new folks. Nothing innovative about it.
Netvibes and popurls are a lot better. Check out GossipMojo.com
(it is done in less than an hour)
Kiki
Hey I made one too.
http://my.allto....com/livecrunch
Love GK’s web app.
I have to say that the application does not do a lot. Maybe it’s just a beta version?
might as well just use any standard feed reader.
Alltop is doing better than TechMeme now. Pretty amazing actually.
Perfect! Check out what Guy has to say about all top on my exclusive interview with him:
http://pop17.co...s/guy-kawasaki/
I think one of the disconnects here is that AllTop is not aimed at the typical TechCrunch reader. It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of an utter newbie if you’re not one.
Is a walled garden approach ultimately limiting? Sure. Can you still build a decent business around it? Absolutely. Say what you will about AOL, but they have made a lot of money over the years.
AllTop is not trying to be the next Facebook of the world and they are not trying to push the envelope on new technology. They have a niche that they seem to be serving well, if the traffic numbers are any indication. If you keep your costs low, that’s not a bad business model.
btw… my 2cents: the twitterati should be based on an algorithm and not who “they” think should be on it.
I may be mistaken, but from what I understand most everything you see served on alltop (user requested content excluded) is based on “the teams” own personal choices. Meaning, they selected most of the channels themselves. I have no problem with that however, some understandably may.
Other than that I found it to be a useful resource.
Search for “layoffs” and they return one result…”baseball”.
huh?
How is this useful?
It’s funny how TC realizes AllTop doesn’t do anything others haven’t done or is trivial, but yet they do not post similar critiques of crappy Y-Combinator startups that get posted here all the time.
I bet if a Y-Combinator startup had launched with identical features to MyAllTop, TechCrunch would be raving about it.
You know, i like the forbes rss feeds. You can enter a search term and set that up as your feed (for example, i used the term “bank of america” and it’s like their search results for bank of america are sent to me via rss). Alltop however… doesn’t really cut it for me.
Alltop, anyone could programmed that site
I did a video about a desktop ticker that I mashed up http://www.yout...h?v=fOWx7nM47V0 . The link to the ticker is on my blog http://danfoley...g-alert-system/ .
It pops up when there is something new on a blog you are following.
As a site owner, I’m not going to get on the AllTop-hatin’ bandwagon. They’re proving to be a good source of traffic for me on top of being my favorite way to get the feeds I’m interested in. I’m subscribed to NetVibes, but AllTop just feels cleaner for me.
allcrap
The only reason to join is to get your URL, add a feed and never go back. Since I refuse to kiss up I can’t even put my feed in it, thanks for nothing.
@mike p
“As a site owner, I’m not going to get on the AllTop-hatin’ bandwagon. They’re proving to be a good source of traffic for me”
Exactly, so what happens when your site is not included in the appropriate alltop? Isn’t that what this article is all about?
As a site owner who isn’t listed on alltop all i can do is continue to submit my site till someone feels sorry for me or till i stop caring and hope my traffic doesn’t get hurt too much.
Guy has influence, and that means eyeballs, so regardless of what i think about the Guy, i want on to be listed on alltop for the follow-through to my site.
This is going to be huge and when you use it with sthrt.com it works great!
It might be that Alltop’s misfired in their implementation of this, but their heart’s in the right place
Ask a hundred people what Facebook or Twitter is and most will have a response. Ask them about Firefox or RSS and most won’t have a clue.
There’s a place for services like Alltop – to address the great many people interested in aggregated news, but without the knowledge or patience to learn about RSS.
You don’t need to understand POP3 to use email, so why do you need to understand RSS to use personalised news?
Get a Popurls and Alltop Clone PHP Script here…
http://www.rssgeni.com
“In my opinion, anyone who thinks the process of personalizing your RSS feed reading experience with Netvibes or iGoogle is cumbersome will probably feel the same way after trying MyAlltop.”
I used to do this with PageFlakes, I briefly gave Netvibes & iGoogle a try. And yes I felt the same way when MyAlltop came out.
But that was ok because for over a year I’ve had in my mind to build what I wanted. And now I’ve done it
Thy News http://thynews.com allows you to easily create a custom news page by searching for feeds and adding them to you page with a nice AJAX user experience.
Here is a demo screencast http://bit.ly/thynews-demo
your*