Alltop.com Beats Jason Goldberg's social|median to the Punch
Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist and Apple evangelist, just announced the launch of Alltop.com, a site which helps its users explore their passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web. They've grouped these collections -- "aggregations" -- into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and, wait for it, careers.
Content from a number of my favorite bloggers are included at Alltop, including Penelope Trunk, Jason Alba, Karen Burns, G.L. Hoffman, Gautam Ghosh, Todd Raphael, Joel Cheesman, Gerry Crispin, George Lenard, Dave Mendoza, Lindsey Pollak, and Toby Dayton. Oh, and this blog is there too.
Each of the 40 Alltop sites displays the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page -- they call this "single-page aggregation." Think of Alltop as an on-line magazine rack that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Their goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99 percent of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Alltop describes their approach as as "aggregation without the aggravation."
So what does this have to do with Jason Goldberg, former CEO of Jobster? Well, Jason's new venture is a product called social|median. When it goes live, social|median should enable people to get highly personalized news inspired by people with similar interests. The site is currently in testing and recently put out a call for beta testers.
Does the earlier release of Alltop spell the doom of social|median along with its $1 million in funding? Hardly. Jason's a smart guy. And so is Guy. :-) But as a college professor once told me, there is always room for another great pizza restaurant. Just because you're first to market doesn't mean that you will succeed nor does being second or later to market mean that you will fail. The better the idea and the better the execution the better the chances of success.
Thanks for the blog post Steve. What we're doing is actually not like AllTop at all. But as you note there are a lot of folks trying to solve this problem. We're early in our product development and getting good and helpful feedback from our early users.
Those who are interested in social|median should consider becoming alpha users and therefore being able to use an early version of the system. The version that exists on official launch will likely be quite different than the early version that exists today but the early version should be quite interesting. Sign up at http://www.socialmedian.com/2008/03/early_alpha_update.html.