

NowPublic news site buys Guy Kawasaki's Truemors website - nickb
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080710130330.p1rpxko5&show_article=1

======
edw519
I wonder which was a bigger factor in this acquisition, the merits of the
business or the fame of the founder.

~~~
fallentimes
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.

~~~
adrianwaj
This is how Guy has described Truemors to me:

"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:

<http://smashingfeeds.com/>

<http://www.eufeeds.eu/>

Basically, Alltop appears like a set of Netvibes universes, but customized for
the mass-market and promoted more heavily.

<http://eco.netvibes.com/universes>

~~~
shawndrost
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."

~~~
adrianwaj
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.

------
axod
Is every page on truemors.com supposed to show a boring press release? What
did the site have on it before this?

------
brm
Who sells a site and then issues a press release about themselves, Guy
Kawasaki that's who

~~~
merrick33
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.

------
jwesley
Clearly bought for the publicity and VC cash potential. I bet the price tag is
sub 50K.

------
ericwaller
Truemors.com redirects to nowpublic.com and crashes firefox

(winXP, firefox 3)

------
mpc
Has to be for sub 1mm. I forgot about truemors and was surprised it's still
up!

------
readerlover
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.

