I love the work that Electric Pulp does, and I think the AllTop design is a big improvement, but AllTop in general is shady. Guy Kawasaki stole the idea from Original Signal and popurls and I just can’t get over that. Yeah, a tiny link saying it was “inspired by popurls” is nice, but it’s like 9px font at the bottom of the page.

I agree…this is definitely a rip from thsoe sites mentioned. One thing I do enjoy about this over the others is the sources it pulls from, I love reading about technology and I also love how Alltop includes TechCrunch, which is my all-time most favorite technology blog, and then it also has many other great resources that Original Signal and PopURLS lack.

I just wish they wouldn’t have made the setup almost identical, they should’ve expanded the look to make it even more appealing.

electric pulp is grand!

I always seem to have trouble organizing loads of content into a nice structure.

There always seems to be two extremes when it comes to content. There is either:

1. Too much content
2. No content.

Thanks for the article collis!

We “ripped Thomas Marban and Popurls off”? Why don’t you ask Thomas how he feels? This is what our About says:

———-
This is the true story of Alltop. If you hear anything else from us, it’s because we retroactively changed the story for marketing purposes. We are the creators of Truemors, a site that is “NPR (or CBC) for your eyes” in the sense that it contains unusual breaking news, stories, and rumors like what you’d hear on NPR. A bit after the site’s launch, our friend Thomas Marban included Truemors in his single-page aggregation of news and tech sites called popurls.

We noticed that popurls sends Truemors as much traffic as Google. Clearly, he was onto something: Aggregate and display a bunch of sites for people, and they will come. This got us thinking about other topics that (a) have a large readership and (b) hasn’t been aggregated in an elegant and efficient manner, and we came up with idea of a doing a popurls of celebrity gossip sites. Then one thing led to another: Why not other topics like gaming, sports, politics, Macintosh, fashion, etc.?

———-

Everything in the footer is in 9 point. Even the credit to Electric Pulp, our terms of use, blog, etc. Prior to releasing Alltop, I had not even seen Original Signals.

Maybe you’re not American. In America, I thought you’re innocent until proven guilty. :-)

Guy

What is wrong with taking a idea and making it better? Trust me I am looking for a way to duplicate the success of Alltop

LOL. “Stole” the idea from someone? That’d be just about everybody in the market, then. No offense to anyone, but that statement was pretty immature. You’d be eaten alive in the entertainment business.

Probably two dozen copy cat/inspired sites launched after my start-up Stylediary. I took it as a compliment. It’s pretty gracious of Guy in my opinion to give props to Popurls….

1. Choose feeds.
2. Display on web page.

Hardly patent-worthy stuff, is it? Popurls was great for anybody who couldn’t be bothered to set up a feed reader back in the day, but it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.

Guy’s venture seems to appeal more broadly to a mass audience, and there’s nothing especially new in aggregating news, as Google and Yahoo will tell you.

Also, you could argue that Popurls ripped off NewsNow.co.uk, which has been going for a decade.

I don’t get the benefit of any of these mentioned sites. Grouping the feeds by origin is probably the most inefficient way to deal with high amounts of information.

I’d prefer having a filterable and searchable web 2.0 feed aggregator with some predefined feed topics.

Like that I would have the full power of an aggregator and the convenience of not needing to add all those feeds myself (but just the feed categories, e.g. “apple”, “tech” etc.).

Guy Kawasaki, when will you take this opportunity and implement it on Alltop?

I don’t mind anyone “stealing” an idea as long as they better it! Go Guy Go!!!

Using a site’s idea but implementing it even better is healthy for the web as a whole.

I could see your point if it was a shabby site which stole the idea to try to grab some Google ad commission, but AllTop is really well designed and obviously a lot of work has gone into it.

Also, AllTop forces PopUrls to look at themselves and try to improve their site. Meaning us users get 2 great sites instead of 1 good site.

Welcome to the “internets” are you new? Alltop does an excellent job, and as mentioned above forces others to improve themselves. That’s the way it works.