By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 12:02 am
At South by Southwest Interactive, I checked in with Guy Kawasaki, the one-time Mac evangelist, longtime entrepreneur/author, Twitter dynamo, and founder of Alltop, a news and information site built on 31,000 hand-picked RSS feeds on topics of all sorts. Today, the site launched MyAlltop, a new feature that lets you build a custom page with your favorite feeds.
It’s a welcome addition, since Alltop, while cool, has also been a little overwhelming. Guy describes it as an online magazine rack, which makes sense, but with it’s so vast and jam-packed that it reminds me of one of those New York newsstands that’s so dense with magazines that it’s simultaneously exciting and intimidating.
You know, one like this (photo borrowed from The New York Review of Magazines):
With MyAlltop, you start by rummaging through Alltop’s topic pages. But every feed on every page now has a plus sign: Click it, and that feed gets added to your My Alltop page. Which looks just like any other Alltop page, except every feed is one you picked, and you can order them on the page to your liking:
I also like the fact that MyAlltop pages are public–there’s actually no way to hide them–so you can share a link to yours to show what you’re reading. Here, for instance, is the Technologizer tech-news page I’m in the process of constructing. (It’s still a work in progress.)
Alltop has always been entertaining to burrow through; MyAlltop makes it a lot more personal, and more useful if your goal is to dive in, see what’s new in your favorite feeds, then dive out. It’s not a replacement for your current RSS reader–in fact, it’s not really an RSS reader at all, since you select from Alltop’s list of feeds rather than plugging in any URL you please. But it’s fun, fast, and very, very simple to use. If you check it out, let me know what you think.
March 17th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I agree, it’s fast, fun and very easy!
This is the perfect tool for me, since I have so many interests and read a lot online. The genius of it is the constantly updated content from the feeds and the fact that most of the work is done for us already (pre-aggregated).
I love it and appreciate Guy K. and his team for putting this together as a free service
October 12th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Looks like just another data-mining scam to me. Why do we have to pass through intermediary pages to get to the content?
October 16th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
It's been a long while since we've become acquainted, but I've just begun to explore the site
December 26th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Foodies are rare and no threat to restaurants and little help to groceries. The remote control may be always used, but rarely used. The path of least resistance does not travel through DIYville. The genius of Facebook is that it let little social units arise where many benefited from the work of but a few, and where the least little contribution by any flavored the whole.
There is zero social utility in anything personal.
Anything that has zero social utility is inevitabily unsatisfying.