Useless Has a Name: Alltop
There aren’t too many websites that irritate or annoy me other than the usuals; MySpace and the like. Unfortunately, I am adding a new site to that list today, Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture called Alltop. Since Uncov.com is no longer around, I will critique Alltop on their behalf. It’s horrible, or as they would say, FAIL.
Alltop is bad in that it offers no real value. It’s a bunch of RSS aggregators. These already exist in useful forms like popurls but Alltop takes a great concept and ruins it by overdoing it. Alltop consists of many pages of aggregation modules showing off headlines from various feeds. If that wasn’t bad enough there’s even a page showing recent updates from Twitter “celebs”. It’s not logical for someone to sit and scan through hundreds of headlines presented with similar weight on a single page. It’s pure and simple information overload.
I don’t think RSS is so hard to use that people will resort to checking Alltop daily. Guy Kawasaki says the goal of the site is to cater to those who don’t use RSS or custom start pages (like Pageflakes, Netvibes, etc). RSS is a growing trend with FeedBurner totalling around 70 million subscribers alone, even casual Internet users are getting the hang of RSS, especially the types of people that read sites aggregated by Alltop.
Mashable reports that Kawasaki launched Alltop for $10,000. He seems set on launching half thought-out ideas for cheap, similar to the forgotten Truemors. Similar to how I commented on Truemors’ launch, a site such as Alltop could have been built (better) by a college coder, or just about anyone on Hacker News, with some free time.
I’m not even sure what else to say.. Alltop just gets on my nerves. It’s helplessly bad. A general rule of thumb before launching anything: flesh out the idea at least a bit before building it. Here is a top-secret transcript of Alltop’s first and last brainstorming session:
Person 1: Hey! We should build an awesome Web 2.0 app.
Person 2: That’s a great idea! Think we can do it for $10,000?
Person 1: No problem, we’ll just launch with no features and overpay someone to use open source RSS aggregation tools to grab headlines.
Person 2: I like it. When’s launch?
Person 1: Is tomorrow good for you?
What are your thoughts on Alltop.com?
Yeah. It DOES look useless; but then again… I don’t do RSS that much.
I took 5 seconds to look at it, realize it was totally useless, and never went back.
Easy on the liver… you’re far too young to hate something that much!!!… Hmm wait a minute. What??!!! Oh god I think I’ll go blind after looking at that site…
Now wouldn’t you think the cherry on the cake would be if they charged you for using the site?
Where did the $10,000 go?
@Tim Trueman: My question, exactly.
How can something like this possibly take $10,000 to build?
Given the number of libraries available to parse RSS for various langnuages and the uninspired design of this site development costs must have been maybe 10 - 20 hours crunching PHP.
Content is easy, a couple hundred popular feeds, most likely gleaned from FeedBurner or Technorati.
Server costs can’t be much either, even if he updated the feeds every 5 mins, you could still serve static cached pages all the time meaning the load is basically nothing and the content it pretty much all text (and not even that much text) meaning the bandwidth use is negligible also.
Also, the site is retarded, anyone who actually considers it useful clearly isn’t aware of what a feedreader is or what constitutes something that isn’t stupid.
@Tim, @anon - Likely most of that money went to legal fees and the site was created a “professional” service that charges and arm and leg for design/code. But yes I agree, $10k is way too much for a site anyone with a PHP book and motivation can create.
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
Allcrap !
Don’t use RSS much either. I find a few things I like too read, then visit the owner’s site and make sure I help them pay the rent now and then. Instead of organizing my info overload, I like to lighten it.
I do have to hand it to electric pulp, they do an incredible job milking cash out of people who have no clue.
I actually don’t think it’s all that bad. This is the kind of site your grandmother would use if she was into Linux and didn’t know anything about RSS. It’s simple and does one thing - and in my opinion it does it well - not that the one thing is hard to do.
I do agree that someone could have done this in their spare time for MUCH less than $10,000.
Yea That is a lot, but one of my family friends in england who is a dentist wanted a website so she came to me. She told me that a service in england asked her 5000 pounds ($10k) to make a website for her. The website is nothing more then a few static pages and a decent logo/branding. So 10k for a coded php site doesn’t sound too bad. I can’t believe how firms can justify so much money to make a simple website.
Yeah I was just being sarcastic, $10k seems kinda overboard to me. But in the end more power to you if your idea pays off in the end, which who knows, maybe it’s coverage for how bad it is will work to his advantage.
we are not supposed to criticize anyone’s idea besides bad ideas in the world make good ideas stand out right.
10K for that is really expensive but i dont think the site deserves such a harsh review. There’s millions of useless sites out there, so 1 more is no big deal. hehe “If you dont like it dont check it” is my philosophy…
maybe they’ve done something to you ? or used ur feed without permission ?
I checked it out last night for the first time and couldn’t see how I could have a use for it. Thought it was just me, and that I just didn’t “get it”. Maybe it’s not just me. Thanks for validating my opinions Paul Stamatiou!
I wouldn’t mind an open source version of this to use for my own stuff on my own site though.
It’s a massive cover-up. The 10k was blown on something completely unrelated to the site, and Alltop.com is just a cover-up to explain the missing money. (Ever seen Mel Brooks’ “The Producers”?)
Guys motivation is less about the product itself and more about sharing the experience on how he got it off the ground.
During the first bubble, and even a bit during this one, the only companies that got any amount of press were those that were raising millions of dollars. This is incredibly disheartening to someone that wants to build a web company (i.e. my mom - let the jokes begin), but doesn’t know the first thing about doing that.
I love Guy K. I hated Truemours and didn’t give Alltop a second thought, but I believe that what he is trying to prove is that, with limited investment, anyone with an idea can launch a web company. I admire the enthusiasm.
For you and most of your readers, Alltop is something that you can bang out in a few hours (days max) for the cost of the domain, hosting & your time. If you don’t have the experience to do this, is it easier to go to some outsourcer to have it finished for 5x that? Probably.
Guy also spends an exorbitant amount on legal fees for his company. I recall him saying that he spent about $4,500 for Truemours. I suspect that the same was spent on Alltop. Unless he is expecting one of these to be a huge homerun, I don’t understand why you’d spend close to 50% of your budget on legal fees. The average Joe won’t do this up front, but will slowly learn when it is good to spend on this and when it isn’t.
What he is showing is what you, me & most people in this industry have known for a long time. It is really easy to get a company off the ground. What is cool about Guy is doing, is that he is giving inspiration & guidance to everyone that thinks “It would be great to start a company that does X”. They may not have the programming skills to do it, but with enough room on a Visa, they can build it.
Couldn’t agree more Paul. In short, I dont like the product/app. I have written in great length at my blog chilligavva.com
Guy Kawasaki is pushing truemors and now alltop virulently. Since the world is so big, there will be takers at given point of time. But is it a needed or great product? I think not !
And most people are getting RSS. Its just a matter of time. Somewhere down the timeline, people would replace alltop, with their fav. rss reader :)
Electric Pulp didn’t charge for Alltop.
@Aaron - thanks for the comment. Where did that $10k go? It can’t have been used solely for legal fees can it? I can understand a bit for hosting.. but the rest?
fantastic paul.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you
Sure, it’s great for non-rss netizens, but I was thinking the same thing when I first saw Alltop. This costs $10k? Unless there’s something more, don’t get it. Looks like something anyone could clobber together in a sec… heck, even put one together using Netvibes or something.
Where did that money go into?
This comment thread is disturbing, not as it applies to this particular project, but as it applies to the web industry in general. I have been working in this industry as a full time professional for a long time, and the point of view expressed here is just dead wrong. How can a project like cost $10K? I’ll tell you how.
Code is the smallest part of any project. You have absolutely no way of knowing how many hours a firm spends in conversations, planning, ideas that may have been discarded, how long it took the client to finalize content selections, etc. In addition, a web professional, be that freelance or firm, is on the hook for a relatively high percentage of overhead in taxes alone.
While you guys can knock out this code set for “X”, that is essentially the commodity part of a project.
By espousing the point of view that that is all a project should cost, it hurts the general public impression of us all.
I think Alltop is utterly lame. However, it seems extremely ill-advised too critique not the site itself, but the cost, when coming from a highly inexperienced point of view.
Why don’t we stick it to Guy and do travel.alltop.com before he does? All you programming studs say it can be done in a few hours. Getting the sites is even easier. Let’s do it and prove how easy it is.
From what I can gather, this is what Guy and his wasted $10,000 is doing for any given topic: 80 feeds, refreshed every ten minutes, suck in the headlines and first paragraph of the five most recent stories, cache the 80 feeds so the topic can be delivered under load in under five seconds, and there needs an admin site so that feeds can be added, deleted, reordered, renamed.
Will someone post a site that does this so, and I’ll tell Guy that he’s now a proven clown? Or are all you blowhards who can only talk a good game?
I guess you guys are all blowhards. Why doesn”t one of you do a clone to prove it can be done “in minutes”?
@FGK - trust me I would just to prove your point if I actually had some time to spare. All you need is an decent RSS parsing library (that’s what google’s for), caching, a cron job or something to fetch the feeds at a certain interval, and a PHP/RoR, as well as a cold beer.
oh, and a list of feeds
I don’t object to the statements about the future success of this proejct.
But regarding the budget… hold on a minute.
@Gidget makes the best points here. It’s easy to see how $10K can be spent on any small web project.
Why lambaste someone who is willing to hire and PROPERLY pay professionals…? (The very people you each seem to suggest to be.)
Yeah I agree with you. Guy Kawasaki should learn to invest his money better, he doesn’t really innovate
I’m amazed by all the negativity about Alltop. Although I run a travel website and write 2 travel blogs I’m not a techie person.
I think Alltop is a great resource, you can check out the titles of all the leading blogs in topics which area of interest to you, quickly and easily. Not everyone understands RSS and/or want to subscribe to blogs. Alltop offers a good alfternative.
I have to admit to some bias as both my travel blogs are listed in Travel Alltop.
Here’s my post, “Does Alltop sound the death knell for blog subscription or an edn to being b(l)ogged down” (you can see why I’ve used tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/54sezr
I must say I like Alltop. I use it as a complement to traditional RSS. I am trying to cut down on the RSS/twitter feeds I subscribe to in order to cut down on distractions. Skimming Alltop lets me see if I have missed anything interesting. For example today I saw a review of a Stox, a program I was interested in, on Alltop. I also like to skim the deals section for stuff I don’t need.
Another way people could use Alltop as a complement to RSS is to get exposed to a feed that they like then add it to their RSS reader (Vienna is my favorite btw).