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. → Read More
Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors is testing out a new version of the service for Facebook. This is a very different application from Truemors.com, which is a sort of Digg for rumors. TFF is an application to spread rumors just with your friends, or a subset of friends: TFF is very different from Truemors.com. Our site is for you to “tell the world,” so if you post something at Truemors.com, anyone with a browser can read it. With Truemors.com, our intent is to spread information as far and wide as possible. By contrast, TFF is for you to “tell your friends.” You can post something that only your friends can read and discuss. In fact, you can get even more specific: Selecting just a few of your friends. Add Truemors for Friends here. → Read More
Truemors, Guy Kawasaki’s new startup, opened to the public about an hour ago. We covered them last week when we were able to get into the beta. Truemors is a rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page. Top “truemors” right now: NBC to launch Heroes spinoff, a public scandal involving an Indian cricket star, and a story about a “hot chick” robbing an Austin bank. I like the idea of truemors but they are launching very broadly. Digg became popular based on focusing on a tech niche to start (and it may be stuck there as it tries to expand). Truemors launches with ten different categories. The content may be too varied to appeal to any distinct audience. → Read More
We mentioned Guy Kawasaki’s newest venture, Truemors, last week along with some early comments we got from the private beta testers (“rumor reporting bulletin board with twitter-like capabilities”). We’ve now gotten into the private beta via some “borrowed” credentials and have had a look around for ourselves. The site, which is built on the WordPress platform, is a category-based rumor site where anyone can phone, text or email in a rumor. The company has partnered with Spinvox to allow people to leave rumors by voice. Spinvox then converts them to text for posting on the site. You can call 1-650-329-2020 and leave your own rumor, if you wish. Text messages should be sent in the following format: Text “2020 ” to 55022. Rumors can also be posted to post@truemors.com. Once rumors are on the site, other users can leave comments and vote it up or down. Like Digg, all new postings are listed for people to review and vote on. If enough people think a rumor is interesting, it makes it to a top list (the equivalent of the Digg home page). Click on the screen shot to see a full size version. → Read More
The secret startup Guy Kawasaki has been working on will be called Truemors, a source tells us. The site is currently password protected, but Kawasaki has recently posted on his blog saying he’s looking for “people who are in the flow of interesting and true rumors.” The service will be a “rumor reporting bulletin board with twitter-like capabilities.” Look for a launch later this month. A screen grab of a cached version of the site (more here): → Read More
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