Sometimes I prefer to wait before blogging about a news item. I learn by reading everyone else's comments and I get to observe how the the news maker responds to the initial wave of feedback from the blogosphere. That's what I'm doing with Guy Kawasaki's Alltop. It launched early in February and is evolving based on initial feedback. I sent Guy my thoughts too and he responded via email. Guy's responses are in italics.

What is Alltop?
Alltop aggregates RSS feeds from key blogs around the web. It categorizes them by topic and each topic gets its own page. There are around 30 topics varying from Design to Celebrities and Gaming to Mac. The most controversial topic is Egos which includes blogs from those that Guy considers to be the egos of the web. Guy Kawasaki chooses which blogs to publish as well as the ordering of the blogs. There's basically no user input involved in the hierarchy and choices of the blogs. No personalization at all.



What do I like about it?

1. It points me to some useful blogs. While I know which are the important blogs in my primary areas of interest like Social Media, Design, Mac, Politics and Food, I don't know which blogs to scan in other areas. In that sense, Alltop serves as a starting point especially if I am doing some research.

2. It's clean, uncluttered and kind on the eyes. Each topic has 50-100 RSS feeds. They have a lot of information. But somehow the pages don't seem cluttered and dense. In fact, Alltop seems lighter than my iGoogle pages which have roughly the same number of RSS feeds.

3. Less is more for Alltop. I know exactly what to expect from Alltop and every page meets those expectations. There aren't any surprises and nor do I need to watch a flash tutorial to understand what's going on. There isn't anything complex about this.

4. Applying progressive disclosure. I really like how mousing over a headline gives me more information. We've all seen this elsewhere on the web, it is a useful, time saving feature. I don't like how Google forces me to click a plus sign to get that information.

What's not working?

1. No conversation opportunities. I'm surprised few other bloggers picked up on this. I find it really disappointing that there's no way for me to comment on Alltop itself. Or to see the number of comments associated with an RSS feed. Now I know this would be harder to do technologically but its worth putting effort into this. Maybe for Version 2.0? What about a way to rate the blogs themselves or to suggest new blogs. Don't miss the conversation opportunities. Please don't miss the conversation opportunities.

Guy's feedback - This is sort of off-vision for us. Not everything has to be a social networking/conversation site. We want to be "digital magazine rack" not a pickup bar. By contrast, here's a site that I think goes too far the other way: fastcompany.com.

So we don't want the site cluttered by comments, lame or smart. We want people to come to their topics, scan, read some stories in depth, and be done with it. If they want friends, they can go to Facebook.

2. Blog hierarchy doesn't make sense on topic pages. I don't understand Guy's ordering of the blogs in each topic. Is it by his preference, technorati rankings, when they were added, evolving popularity.... I have no idea. If you're not letting me set my own order at least tell me how you've set it yourself.

The rationale is very complex, actually. And it's mostly in my brain. :-) The first 15 feeds or so are either very popular ones to give people a comfortable feeling, very good (good does not always equal popular), strategic (ie, good for positioning Alltop as useful), or my buddies/people who have helped me or the site. How do I explain this? We're not some division of CNN or Yahoo!. We are quirky, opinionated, etc. little startup than can do whatever it wants without a consulting study from Forrester or McKknsey.

One exception is Religion.alltop.com which is purely alphabetical since it's too hard to judge "quality" for this topic.

I also am not a big believer in the wisdom of the crowds, so it's not going to be just some gameable system of ranking. Plus, the ranking and positions cannot be dynamic. People want to know, more or less, when they come back that the feeds are roughly in the same place all the time.

We may open up for a poll to solicit feedback, but that's just do discover gems that we don't know about, not to make it a user-generated order. At the most, we're considering drag and drop reordering of feeds.

3. You need to scroll to find topics on the front page. Descriptions certainly help readers understand a topic but if that forces topics below the fold, you've got a problem. I would remove the descriptions (or maybe have them appear on mouse over) so that all the topics fit above the fold on a 1024*768 screen.

At some point soon, we're going to have to redesign our home page. We were only going to to celebrity gossip and just kept on going. I doubt we can get away with no description. Also, I believe is something is compelling enough, having a few folds won't kill you:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/02/demystifying-ab.html

4. Can't browse and switch between topics. It appears that Alltop is designed for the surgical user in mind. The person who knows his favorite topics and likes to only visit them everyday. The person who probably bookmarks the topic page directly. But what about the user who likes to browse between topics? Once I'm on a topic page I have to click the annoying Alltop band to go back to the home page to choose another topic. Let me jump across topics directly.

I don't know about surgical, but but we don't think people will linger at the home page. How do you jump across topics in Google Reader? If you don't have folders, your feeds are all intermingled. If you have folders, you have to navigate through folders. How do you browse in Google Reader or any other customized reader?

We think people will bookmark their favorite topics. They might come to the home page once and never again.

Here's the $64,000 question. Not knowing your family at all, suppose your mother, father, spouse, or kid one day asked, "I love XX, can you show me where I can get the best news about it?" Where XX = fashion, gadgets, sports, religion, green, humor, cute, design, celerities, etc.

What are you going to say? Get Google reader/NetNewsWire/Pageflakes/Netvibes/iGoogle/MyYahoo, then find some good sites, then import their feeds, then organize your reader, then check updates? Wow, you must love your relatives more than I do. :-) And most likely they will say, "Huh? Where do I get that?" After they get it, "Where do I find the feed?" After that "How I do Import? What's XML? What's RSS 2.0?"

How long did it take you go get Google Reader to the state you have it in today? Our page for any topic renders in 5 seconds. :-) Assuming we have topic you want. For you, the marginal value of spending hours over the course of time to customize Google Reader is worth it. We're looking to serve the 99.9% of the world who will not use RSS feeds the way you, I, and Dave Winer do. If it means that the .1% won't use Alltop, that's the risk we have to take.

Alltop in of itself isn't something revolutionary. Some would argue that it isn't even a digital product in its own right (aggregating blogs is not revolutionary). But it does serve a basic need - helping us figure out what to read. But in this day and age that may not be enough. I wonder what the final version will be like.

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