NowPublic news site buys Guy Kawasaki's Truemors website

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080710130330.p1rpxko5&show_article=1

by nickb • 18 years ago

18 28 18 years ago

breitbart.com

edw519• 18 years ago

I wonder which was a bigger factor in this acquisition, the merits of the business or the fame of the founder.

ojbyrne3• 18 years ago

... or the founder's access to VC money.

sabat3• 18 years ago

Guy does have that kind of access, but he didn't use it in this case. Nor did he need to -- in fact, he overspent. (There was a lot of talk here about that fact when Truemors first appeared.)

Guy spent about $13K on the whole shebang.

shafqat• 18 years ago

With all due respect, I think it is the latter obviously.

aneesh• 18 years ago

I think that was implied in edw519's post.

sabat3• 18 years ago

It's hard not to be a little bit jealous. I have ideas that are at least as good as Truemors (certainly more innovative). While my lack of microceleb status isn't going to stop me from pursuing them, seeing what fame can do to your success rate is a little disheartening.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

What's hilarious is that the site got the majority of its traffic from popurls.com. So without Guy's "fame" and popurls the site would have fizzled long ago (i.e. not made it based on its own merits). Now it gets acquired and really demonstrates the importance of connections.

adrianwaj2• 18 years ago

This is how Guy has described Truemors to me:

"Truemors has evolved a lot. It was wide open, and we found that only a handful of people sent in quality stuff. Now anyone can post, but we hold for approval those from people we don’t know. There is a group of people who have accounts who can post directly. We actually pay those people."

Guy's new site, http://alltop.com/ has a similar concept to Popurls: hand-selected feeds shown in boxes, with mousovers for headline descriptions but the site having multiple subdomains for each of the topics it features. Its's described as "an online magazine rack of popular topics such as politics, science, fashion, celebrities, Macintosh, etc."

Guy's obviously seen the power of Popurls in helping Truemors. One thing he's done with Alltop is emailed the bloggers whose feeds he places on the site, who then to promote Alltop to their readers.

Other sites similar to Alltop.com, and therefore Popurls are:

http://smashingfeeds.com/

http://www.eufeeds.eu/

Basically, Alltop appears like a set of Netvibes universes, but customized for the mass-market and promoted more heavily.

http://eco.netvibes.com/universes

rms• 18 years ago

or number of users... truemors did get reasonably popular for a Web 2.0 site

axod2• 18 years ago

Is every page on truemors.com supposed to show a boring press release? What did the site have on it before this?

brm• 18 years ago

Who sells a site and then issues a press release about themselves, Guy Kawasaki that's who

axod2• 18 years ago

And makes apache serve it up for every damn request to truemors.com/<anything>

sabat3• 18 years ago

I'd do it, too. Maybe he's feeding his ego, but it makes business sense if you want to keep doing what you just did.

merrick33• 18 years ago

Everyone should, don't be afraid to boast about your business successes. I know we have been taught to be modest, but press releases are an acceptable format and wide reaching vehicle to building up your personal brand.

If you're not proud enough to talk about your business achievements, why should anyone else.

cdr• 18 years ago

A smart person.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

Someone whose site didn't get bought for a lot of money.

mpc• 18 years ago

Has to be for sub 1mm. I forgot about truemors and was surprised it's still up!

ericwaller• 18 years ago

Truemors.com redirects to nowpublic.com and crashes firefox

(winXP, firefox 3)

jwesley• 18 years ago

Clearly bought for the publicity and VC cash potential. I bet the price tag is sub 50K.

readerlover• 18 years ago

alltop is good, but the problem is it messes up with lots of feeds.. so finally its difficult to get good contents out of it.. i still love smashingfeeds.com as it has limited quality blogs.

NowPublic news site buys Guy Kawasaki's Truemors website

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