Guy Kawasaki: the interview
If you’ve been around computers, particularly the Mac, for any length of time, you probably know who Guy Kawasaki is.
When I sat down to write about Guy, I realized I just didn’t know that much about him; time to do a little research about Guy Kawasaki. The one thing I did know about him was that he was an “evangelist” at Apple; probably one of the first company evangelists out there.
I’m not going to bore you with typical “about” details you can find on his website. Guy, as you know, worked for Apple to evangelize the Macintosh computer. He was there for a few years and helped start up some software companies and ended up back at Apple.
Upon leaving Apple once more, he started up Garage which went through a few incarnations providing services to venture capitalists. He recently sold one venture, Truemors, and is doing quite well with his latest venture, Alltop.
Alltop.com is billed as an online magazine rack that pulls in RSS feeds from blogs and other websites on almost any topic you can think of.
He’s no stranger to controversy, and his latest involves his site Alltop.com, something Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch calls a “big pile of nothing.” For a big pile of nothing, Alltop is doing pretty well, with an Alexa ranking of 88,348. Not too bad for a site that’s been around for less than a year.
Of course not all the comments on Tech Crunch are negative. One commenter pointed readers to a quote from Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, with the quote: “Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.”
Guy Kawasaki: the interview
Click the above link for the MP3 of the interview.
Walter Schwabe, fusedlogic CEO, got on the phone with Guy Kawasaki for a long chat ranging from his latest ventures to social media and how he uses Twitter.
We’ll give you a synopsis of the interview in print and cover the highlights, but you’ll want to download the MP3s for the full conversation. You won’t be disappointed.
truemors.com, how long did you have it? And what was the inspiration for it originally?
Guy had truemors.com for a little more than a year.
“We truly wanted to democratize information.” Instead of wealthy people and religious leaders having had the power to publish in the past (through scribes, printing presses and then desktop publishing), it’s now in the hands of everyone to post anything, spread information, or disinformation.
Truemors is good for people who might like to set up a blog but don’t have the time or capability to do it, but would like to post information.
Sale of truemors
A few weeks before the interview, Guy sold truemors to NowPublic.com and had breakfast with Leonard Brody, owner of NowPublic, a site where people collect and broadcast news.
“Rather than having several hundred reporters, you have tens of thousands of reporters,” Kawasaki said about NowPublic.
I suppose you could call that crowdsourcing?
“Yes, Twitter might be an extreme example of that.”
“I think today, for most events, the first place you would hear about it is Twitter. Even if there are people who are tipsters, who are professional tipsters, and they listen on their scanners to police, and emergency and fire broadcasts right and then they call up the San Jose Mercury and they say I just heard there was an armed robbery at the Ikea [for example] in Palo Alto.”
Guy said newspapers are the next day, online might be a few hours, but someone could be in that Ikea and be on their cell phone immediately on Twitter talking about that armed robbery 30 seconds later.
Walter talked about a similar situation he went through when his wife and daughter were with family visiting Disneyland in the fall and there was a fairly major earthquake in California. He first heard about the earthquake on Twitter and combined listening to CNN with Twitter to try to find out how bad the damage was. The advantage was with Twitter in that he could talk to people who were actually going through it.
About Alltop.com: how is it different than truemors.com?
Guy said he got the idea for Alltop from Popurls.com that had been aggregating the RSS feed from Truemors.
“PopURLs takes about the top 15 or 20 news sites and puts all their feeds together on one page so that you could see the all the news happening from various feeds in one place rather than having to go to 15 individual websites.”
“We noticed that PopURLs was sending us as much traffic as Google. So I got in touch with PopURLs and I said just ‘what’s the story here? How does this work? How can you send us so much traffic?’”
“I got to be friends with him and I said well ‘you’re covering tech and business do you have any intention of covering things like celebrities, fashion, wine, food, cancer, ADHD, autism, sports,’ going down the line, and he said ‘no, I’m just going to stick with tech and business.’”
“So I said ‘alright, so if you’re not going to do it, I’m going to aggregate the news in all those topics’ and so that’s how we started Alltop.”
What’s happening on Alltop and how big will it get?
Guy said they’re adding three to five topics per week and will have a big software change coming up that will allow them to add three to five topics per day.
Initially the topics started out quite broad, like sports.alltop.com but they soon found they needed more specific topics like baseball, cricket, hockey, etc. This will progress to things like newyorkyankees.alltop.com because there are large number of blogs specifically about them.
“It is kind of endless. Someday we’ll be as big as Google maybe.”
Alltop relies on qualities feeds of information.
“I can’t think of a topic where you can’t find 15 or 20 feeds about it. You could take the most esoteric disease that only 5,000 people in the world have and you’ll find 20 feeds or 20 blogs about it.”
Guy hints at how Alltop might change in the future
“At that point we have a different issue. We have a user interface issue because right now you can come to our home page and it’s an alphabetic index. But what happens when we have a thousand topics. You don’t want to be scrolling through all that, so the next version of our homepage you’ll be able to look at things a la index, which is what it is now, or categorized. For example, sports versus arts.”
The third option he’s looking at is a search feature where you’d type in something like “baseball” and you’d see all the different baseball-related categories.
Criticism of Alltop and Guy Kawasaki
Walter recounted some of the criticism of Alltop and Kawasaki that the site is not breaking new technological ground and it’s the same as POPurls.
“In a sense they are correct. This isn’t revolutionary, patent-pending new technology. Anybody can do what we’ve done. All you need to do is set up a little program to aggregate feeds. So there is no proving them wrong in the sense that, you know, it is revolutionary, you are wrong by not calling it not revolutionary.”
“Where we can prove them wrong is they think that it’s not a big deal. I think it is a big deal.”
Guy Kawasaki gives it to Tech Crunch with both barrels
“Now, to be honest, whenever a story breaks in Tech Crunch or in some place like that. No matter what you do, let’s take a far-fetched example. Let’s say that somehow I invent a new kind of battery that will charge in five minutes and will run a Macintosh laptop for 25 hours with absolutely no impact on the environment that can be made for $5 each… and by the way it only ways two ounces.”
“Let’s just say I did that. The comments in Tech Crunch would be ‘I thought of this five years ago. How hard could this be? I could have done this but I didn’t think it was worth doing. The only reason why Guy is in Tech Crunch is because he’s Guy; it’s not because this is revolutionary.’ And so that’s the nature of Tech Crunch.”
“It’s a bunch of angry little people living at home with their mothers who have never even French-kissed. Nothing you could do would impress the Tech Crunch crowd because, according to them, everything is easy, they’ve already done it, they thought of it ten years ago and it’s no big deal.”
“So the bottom line with that is that you just have to ignore those comments.”
“If there were a Tech Crunch the day that Google was announced, people would have said ‘there’s already ten search engines, I thought of doing a search engine by counting the number of links to a site and prioritizing results that way, there is no business model for this and the only reason why it’s in Tech Crunch is because it’s coming out of Stanford.’ Right? That’s what they would have said about Google.’”
“The bottom line lesson is: we need to ignore the bozos in the world.”
Part 2 of Guy Kawasaki interview
In the next installment of our interview with Guy Kawasaki you’ll hear Guy talk about Twitter and how he leverages it, blogging CEOs, who should be Twittering at your company and how you can be successful on Twitter.
Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com
