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.