When former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors two months ago, the site was not well-received. The quality of the user-generated content on the site was low. The U.K. tech site The Inquirer called it the "worst Web site ever discovered."
But it's been a while, and the site has improved. Although Kawasaki is using the site as an example of what can be done on the Web when your personal brand is high and Web developers are cheap -- he says, "You can do a stupid thing for $12,000. Life is good!" -- the site is actually not stupid. It's interesting, and far from the worst Web 2.0 app out there. So forget the man behind the site. Let's look at it as just another Web 2.0 start-up.
Truemors is a "rumors" site. The idea is that you submit a gossip item, and then other people mark it as interesting or not. The interesting items bubble up to the top. Users can also comment on rumors.
My Truemor. Plausible? Maybe. But fake. (I dictated this rumor into the Truemors phone service.)
There are smart elements to Truemors. First, if you've got an item, it's very easy to post it. You can submit items by Web form, e-mail, SMS, and even by voice (Spinvox does the speech-to-text). Since it's a gossip site, you can submit items anonymously.
Interesting science rumors.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Truemors is easy to read. There's a length limit on posts, and items are broken out by category. If you're interested in politics, food, tech, or sex, you can dive right into those and other categories. And the content is not bad. You don't get the geek overload that you do with Digg. Checking the site over the past few days, I found several interesting items, both gossip and actual news. (Unfortunately, the category pages don't yet have their own RSS feeds.)
However, for Truemors to work the way its designers intend, it has to be curated. The Truemors team removes slander, libel, pornography, abject promotional items, blatant advertising, and even boring items. The editorial touch-up on the user-generated items is what keeps the site entertaining and largely free of crap. As long as that can keep going (deputizing devoted readers is a way to do it for free) the site could stay useful.
If the site grows, it will need a more developed community. We'll need ways to follow or ignore items from certain people or groups. We'll need very active moderators, because a successful Truemors site will be overrun with items from bloggers who just prefix their blog headlines with "Did you hear..." and dump them on the site.
Meantime, I like it. It reminds me a bit of StumbleUpon, which is a very efficient way to waste time wandering the Net, except Truemors is text, which is even more efficient. In fact, Truemors reads a little like Harper's Magazine's "Findings" section, except that some of the items are fabrication. But it's still a surprisingly good way to scan for entertaining info tidbits.
The llama, he speaks.
(Credit: Blabberize)I'm sitting on the exquisitely uncomfortable benches in the San Francisco Metreon, listening to companies at the New Tech Meetup give their pitches. Two of them we've covered recently: AdPerk and Truemors. The news about Truemors: a Facebook port is forthcoming. The other three companies are also worth some bits:
Blabberize is a freaky little product that makes Monty Python-like animated graphics of faces from photos you upload. Then you upload a recording of your (or someone else's) voice. It syncs the audio or recorded speech to the moving mouth. Good for a laugh. Likewise the pitch. The presenter, Mo, spent 4 minutes and 45 seconds (of his alloted five minutes) on a killer comedy routine before the demo. Anyway, check it out. Also: Facebook? Yes, coming.
JuggleMyStuff is a site for organizing teams. It's based on lists, and it's easy to reorder items, group them, and assign them to people. Looks pretty smart. We'll check it out in more depth soon. A lot of start-ups have tackled this problem. See also BaseCamp, SmartSheet, and dToDoist.
RateItAll is a site where users can rate products and leave reviews. It has the potential to become a nice, lighter-weight version of what Epinions is, although it still takes two steps to enter a rating rather than just one. But, launching tonight, RateItAll is adding a rating widget that you can embed in your blog, to collect ratings on it. If you dare.
Like Epinions, RateItAll pays its users, by sharing a portion of AdSense revenues on pages that they contribute.
"You can do a stupid thing for 12 grand. Life is good!" So says Guy Kawasaki, founder of the gossipy site Truemors, keynoting here at the Launch Silicon Valley event today. He's pitching his startup in a backhanded way, running down some numbers behind his launch. Here are a few of them:
Guy is fully buzzword-compliant
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)
- 0: Number of business plans written (editorial note: it shows)
- 0: Number of VC meetings taken
- $0: Marketing budget
- $4,500: Total cost of software development (Electric Pulp)
- $399: Cost of logo design (Logoworks)
- $1,115: Cost of registering domains (55 in total)
- 1.5: Full-time employees
- 2: Number of days after launch that Truemors was labeled, "Worst Web site ever," by the Inquirer
- 246,210: Number of pageviews the day after
- 24: Years it took Kawasaki to get to the point where he felt he could launch a site based on not much more than his own name.
Guy Kawasaki: Marketing machine.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)Guy is utterly and completely unapologetic about the controversy that has swirled around Truemors, and the cheap way he launched it (and I mean that more than one way). "Life is good for entrepreneurs these days," Kawasaki says.
But is it? As Kawasaki notes, sites that get a lot of buzz one day can devolve into obscurity on day 2. So while you can launch a site for next to nothing, as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
See the Launch Silicon Valley livestream, courtesy Bub.blicio.us.
Truemors, a new social information site from former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, went live this week, but has suffered some early growing pains.
The site is sort of a combination of Twitter and Digg; users can phone, text or e-mail in rumors, and they're posted to central page. Then other users can vote them up or down.
While the launch of Truemors was widely anticipated, opening day didn't go entirely well. Spam posts quickly appeared on the main site, and bloggers wondered whether its lack of focus would hinder its ability to find a community.
Blog community response:
"Of course, there's no such thing as bad PR on the blogosphere. Well, except silence. That's the most damning thing of all."
--Scobleizer
"There's a lesson here. The site had no focus, and thus no community. A moderator is also a good idea for such sites, because otherwise spam will prevail. There may still be hope for the "greatest" section of the site, where the most popular posts are ranked, and thus presumably only the best material is sifted. When we last looked, however, the top post was about how terrible Truemors is."
--VentureBeat
"I like the idea of truemors but they are launching very broadly. Digg became popular based on focusing on a tech niche to start (and it may be stuck there as it tries to expand). Truemors launches with ten different categories. The content may be too varied to appeal to any distinct audience."
--TechCrunch
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