Review of Alltop

I had the opportunity to check out
Alltop this evening and have to say that the guys at
TechCrunch have this one all wrong. 

Here is where I’m coming from with that…

I read about 20-30 blogs on a regular basis.  I do this partially to stay informed and in some cases to feed my need for ideas to use in posts on Jcyreus dot Com.  In order to consolidate all of the sites that interest me, I use an RSS reader.

When I suggested to KC (wife) that she setup something similar using iGoogle or MyYahoo, she sort of looked at me as if to say that she didn’t have time to screw around with geek-tools the way that I do.  Getting into a discussion with her about how things like that actually save a person time seemed fruitless.  This is where I think
Guy Kawasaki and the folks at Nononina, Inc. have got a winner on their hands.

The Good – The splash page is inherently simple with what appears to be a broad spectrum of subject matter and personal interest options to choose from.  The idea behind this is where I suspect the “magazine rack” notion is coming from.  The basic mouse-over topical summaries is also a nice touch in my opinion.  I see this as something that my wife would use and reference regularly.

The Bad – When I tried loading the splash page from my Samsung smart phone, it didn’t really seem to render properly for me (even though other pages tend to load just fine, including
my blog).  After just a few tries I gave up.  Maybe this isn’t a real big deal, but one would think that in the age of the iPhone it would be.  Also, Alltop seems like a good way to kill time, in an airport for instance, which is another reason I thought mobile access wouldn’t be an afterthought.

The Ugly – It seems to me as if this [news aggregation] space might be a little crowded and that without a considerable amount of advertising and promotions directed at the non-geek user set, Alltop may have a difficult time with reaching the critical mass that they would need to be considered a truly successful venture.

Of course, it doesn’t appear as though a considerable amount of time or $ was put into the development effort for Alltop, so I would guess that Guy and his team are simply looking to create some buzz and sell it off to a company with the brand recognition and juice to promote it properly.