What's hilarious is that the site got the majority of its traffic from popurls.com. So without Guy's "fame" and popurls the site would have fizzled long ago (i.e. not made it based on its own merits). Now it gets acquired and really demonstrates the importance of connections.
"Truemors has evolved a lot. It was wide open, and we found that only a handful of people sent in quality stuff. Now anyone can post, but we hold for approval those from people we don’t know. There is a group of people who have accounts who can post directly. We actually pay those people."
Guy's new site, http://alltop.com/ has a similar concept to Popurls: hand-selected feeds shown in boxes, with mousovers for headline descriptions but the site having multiple subdomains for each of the topics it features. Its's described as "an online magazine rack of popular topics such as politics, science, fashion, celebrities, Macintosh, etc."
Guy's obviously seen the power of Popurls in helping Truemors. One thing he's done with Alltop is emailed the bloggers whose feeds he places on the site, who then to promote Alltop to their readers.
Other sites similar to Alltop.com, and therefore Popurls are:
I heard Guy talk about the origin of alltop last week. He said that he heard about popurls, and how the guy was making money and doing nothing. He was so blown away by this that he called the guy and arranged lunch. Over lunch, he said "So are you going to make popurls for hockey? And wine? And so on?" and the guy said "no." So he said, "Okay, then I'm going to."
It would't be hard to copy Alltop or Popurls. And when I say copy, I mean compete. A quality developer could do a better job, I'm sure. A bit like how http://bit.ly has evolved http://tinyurl.com. There's a lot of power in being able to choose which feeds get listed.
- collect stats and create a recommendation engine.
- run a click tracker and have a switch to display only popular links of day/week/month.
- create a plugin or bookmarklet to quicly add a feed to any particular user-created category on the site.
- also combine feeds, something not done on either of the aforementioned sites and then offer RSS. Sponsor ads could be spliced sparsely.
- commenting
Like DMOZ, each new category could be managed by a volunteer who'd be able to place their feed in the category as payback.
Alltop and Popurls are acquisition targets: create a better site now and ride on their popularity.
Guy does have that kind of access, but he didn't use it in this case. Nor did he need to -- in fact, he overspent. (There was a lot of talk here about that fact when Truemors first appeared.)
Yes, but now he's on the board of NowPublic. As well as a partner at GarageVentures. Should make it easy for NowPublic to raise more money. I.e. I'm characterizing it as a thinly described bribe. I have no idea if that's true, of course.
It's hard not to be a little bit jealous. I have ideas that are at least as good as Truemors (certainly more innovative). While my lack of microceleb status isn't going to stop me from pursuing them, seeing what fame can do to your success rate is a little disheartening.
Everyone should, don't be afraid to boast about your business successes. I know we have been taught to be modest, but press releases are an acceptable format and wide reaching vehicle to building up your personal brand.
If you're not proud enough to talk about your business achievements, why should anyone else.
alltop is good, but the problem is it messes up with lots of feeds.. so finally its difficult to get good contents out of it.. i still love smashingfeeds.com as it has limited quality blogs.
