Thursday, July 10, 2008

Is Guy Kawasaki/Alltop about "meaning" or "money?"

Back in February, Jeremiah Owyang updated (he called it an analysis, and as you'll read in his post, even Forrester Research analysts make mistakes like the rest of us) he had previously written about Guy Kawasaki's new (in his words - "gimmick" site) Alltop.com. The overall reviews from Owyang's twitter followers (follow me here) of Guy's site were mixed at best. Alltop.com was criticized for being a non-innovative "clone" of existing sites like popurls, originalsignal.com. Many did compliment Guy (including Owyang) on his ability to market the site (the Influence model). Citing for example his leveraging of existing "A-listers" in his ego topic section for example to garner attention for Alltop. Further, that "Techcrunch took the bait." Many concluded the attention was really more for Guy, than Alltop.

However, some time has passed now and we all recognize Guy's motivation here is to like most other sites make money. I know that many of you have seen Guy talk ( in person or on video) about his preference for sites or businesses that are about "making meaning "as their core purpose as being the ones that win over those who just want to grow and be acquired from the outset.

So my question to the readers of this post is. If you could only pick one answer: Do you think Alltop.com is about "making meaning" or "making money?"

A second question may be: Has Guy won you over with Alltop yet? It seems that if you search those who have made one of his various lists, that seems to be a proud moment for most... How about you "B-listers" out there...does making an Alltop topic list make a difference? Enquiring minds at fusedlogic want to know...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Before you decide if Alltop makes meaning, please check out these topics:

http://autism.alltop.com/
http://adoption.alltop.com/
ADHD, cancer, etc are coming

Guy Kawasaki

Anonymous said...

I don't think autism and adoption were the first topics up though.

He explains 'make meaning' by doing one or all of the following:

* Make the world a better place
* Increase the quality of life
* Right a terrible wrong
* Prevent the end of something good

I wonder which reasons of these are the basis for Truemors and AllTop because they are not apparent to me though I know he must have justified both ventures in one or more ways.

I think that Guy just likes to do stuff. He's an entrepreneur and I'm the same way. He just sold Truemors (announced today) so it's my guess that an acquisition of AllTop is imminent. Both projects only excite me minimally, only because Guy is working on it. I'm a big fanboy of Guy, don't get me wrong.

If Guy can retrofit his projects by adding in meaning with great topics like ADHD and Adoption, then I think that is also fine.