April 01, 2008, 2:40 PM — It's not an experiment, it's not a demonstration site, it's just a commercial web property designed to provide something useful, gain readership and make some money. Guy Kawasaki's two new Web companies, Truemors.com and Alltop.com, represent a new direction not just for Guy Kawasaki, but for the entire community of Web entrepreneurs. Guy talks about how the Web has changed, and how it's a lot cheaper today to start a Web company than it used to be.
You have two dotcom companies, Truemors and Alltop, which have attracted some attention, not just for their content but because of the way they were launched and funded, or in this case, not funded. What's the premise of the two sites?
People are trying to make it into this grand entrepreneurial experiment that I'm trying to prove that in the Web 2.0 world you can do things for ten or fifteen thousand bucks, it's actually not true. It happens that I have done it for that amount, but they're not experiments per se. I'm really trying to make money. People have this expectation; it's a double edged sword. If anybody else had done this it wouldn't have gotten the publicity. On the other hand, that's kind of an unfair advantage. People are looking at it and saying, "He did this only because it's a good experiment", but really, I'm trying to make money. I was inspired by Hot or Not, and PlentyofFish, Fark, and sites like that, and so why not?
Being an icon isn't all it's cracked up to be.
No, sometimes you're a trash can.
There are a lot of news aggregation sites out there, how is Alltop different from all the other ones?
The fundamental premise is that there is a vast majority of people who do not know or will never know and don't care about figuring out RSS feeds. And so what we're trying to do is create a site that is pre-done according to scores of topics. We have about 45 right now. And what we're trying to do is make it so that someone who just wants to follow the environment or politics or gaming or gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender, they don't have to figure all this out, it's already done for them. We like to position it as an online magazine rack. Now for any given single topic there may have been a site that aggregated sites about that topic, that is true.
There are two kinds of aggregation. One is typically a blog entry that says, these are the 100 best sites about the environment, and it's 100 links. That site is not refreshed. We display the five most recent stories from those 100 sites updated every ten minutes. So it is one thing to get a collection of links to sites, but then you have to click through to each site to read the most current story. It's another to have it all aggregated and displayed constantly. Another big difference is that there have been things very similar to Alltop in the sense that not only do they grab the site, they grab the headline, but I don't think anybody has done it with the breadth that we have. We were inspired by Popurls, and Popurls focuses on tech. That's just one topic, but we have 44 other topics. Original Signals has more than Popurls, but not 45. So we're really going for it, trying to front-end the Internet to make it easier for more people.
Alltop has a very simple and straightforward interface, which is a different approach from a lot of the others that have all the flash animations and special features and gizmos, which take forever to load and cost a million dollars to create. Do successful web sites really need to have all that flash and trash to become successful?
