All Time Alltop Questions and Answers ...

I like and respect Guy Kawasaki. He has personally and professionally helped me several times over the past few years. He has visited Granger and even endorsed my book. Not long ago, we were exchanging emails and I asked him if there was anything I could do to help his causes like he had helped mine. He only asked one thing... spread the word about Alltop. Ok! Love to!

And, then I stalled out.

I didn't understand what Alltop could do for me. That makes it pretty hard to talk about. So, then, I stalled longer because I was determined to figure it out on my own. And, then I stalled longer because I was embarrassed to admit I couldn't figure it out on my own. I finally broke down and told him. Why didn't I do that in the first place? I annoy myself.

And, now that I understand it, I'm pleased to report it has become a new tool in my arsenal of information search weapons. So, here's my Q&A with Guy about Alltop. Hope it helps you.

1. In plain English, what is Alltop?
   
   Alltop is a collection of over 600 "magazine racks" covering topics from adoption to zoology with food, politics, sports, and health in between. MyAlltop is the customizable, power-user feature of Alltop. It enables you to create a personal collection from over 32,000 information sources--if you're interested in something, we probably have it covered.
   
2. How is Alltop different than Digg?
   
   They’re two totally different animals. The purpose of Digg is highlight specific articles that interest, honestly, male techies. It helps them know that there’s a new version of Rails or Halo. The purpose Alltop is not to highlight specific articles or even sites/blogs but to enable people to scan “all” the news about a broad base of topics. For example, it will be long time before something from http://adoption.alltop.com/would appear on Digg. Here’s a good way to think of it:
   
   ** How many people are in China? Go to Google.
   ** Shanghai company clones Mac ROMs and ships “Mac” netbook for $200. Go to Digg.
   ** What’s happening in China? Go to http://china.alltop.com/
   
3. I don’t see Alltop replacing my normal RSS reader, but it’s not supposed to, is it?
   
   For some people, MyAlltop could, but first, most people cannot use a RSS reader. It requires they understand what RSS is, then they need to find the RSS feeds (which is non-trivial, believe me, we have had to find 33,000 feeds), and find a reader and use it. That’s the market for us.
   
   For people who have a RSS reader, then we offer something different because most RSS readers turn into another email inbox with hundreds of unread messages. And they are not good for scanning—that is, you only get what you subscribe to. An Alltop topic provides you a broader overview quickly.
   
4. Where should my readers start to get a feel?
   
   Here http://church.alltop.com/ here http://digital-media.alltop.com/ here http://christianity.alltop.com/ and http://web-design.alltop.com/.

Comments

[CR]

AllTop could theoretically replace Google Reader for me, except for one big thing.

I use Google Reader exclusively on the iPhone. It's nice, it's quick and it's simple. No muss, no fuss, and it has one killer feature which blows AllTop, Digg and most other aggregators out of the water (in my opinion) on the iPhone. You don't need to load in a new page for every single story.

The bane of my iPhone existence is waiting for a page download to complete. Normally I'll have maybe 30 sec - 1 min or so of time to kill (waiting for elevator, in the elevator, waiting for coffee, etc.) and I like to scan the latest news. The Google Reader loads in all the content, displays the headlines, and I'm able to read more without having to go to a new page (and waiting for that page to load in.) This is huge.

If Reader has an interesting story that I want to read more of, then yes, I follow the link and wait for the load. But for maybe 90% of the story headlines/summaries I don't need to. It's quick and painless.

AllTop, while having a nice iPhone-oriented mobile design that presents the type of information I'd like to see still requires a new page to be loaded for each title view. This completely kills it for me, as I don't want to wait umpteen seconds for AT&T's network to deliver something that may or may not be of actual interest to me.

On the desktop side, I have to admit that I feel AllTop's design is too cluttered without proper visual and design focus. Looking at a AllTop summary page is like looking at a game of "Where's Waldo". You have to spend quite a bit of visual effort to figure out what's where and if there's anything worth looking at (and how timely things are, is something more "relevant" or "important" than other elements, etc.)

[Jeremy Scheller]

this is great. I love Guy!
I've been using myAlltop for the last few months and it has basically replaced my RSS Reader.