Alltop is like marijuana (kinda)

“Too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies.”

That’s a horrible place to be stuck if you’re a new web application, and that’s exactly the reaction I received from Jay Moonah when discussing the newly launched Alltop.

For those of you that missed the big announcement by Guy Kawasaki this morning, Alltop is basically an aggregator that groups feeds based on certain topics. According to their website:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se.

I’ve been playing with Alltop for a few weeks now (it has been up for quite some time pre-launch) and have already put it to good use, but it was only after my conversation with Jay today that I realized that the true power of Alltop is its role as a gateway drug.

Alltop is easy to get and easy to like

For reference, here’s a snippet of the conversation I had with Jay over Twitter today:

• jmoonah: Hmmm, not sure I get http://alltop.com/ — is it just a bunch of pages with a bunch of RSS feeds? Am I missing something?
• vasta: That’s all it is. You’re not missing anything. It’s really feed aggregation for dummies, to be honest, and that’s why it’s smart.
• jmoonah: I sort of get it, but I have no idea who I’d point here. To me it looks too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies. Who’s the target?
• vasta: A friend asked me yesterday, “how do you stay on top of all that Mac news?” I pointed him to http://mac.alltop.com/. He=impressed.
• vasta: *I* don’t use Alltop, but it’s a good way to introduce people to feeds if they’re willing to learn but don’t have an entry point.
• jmoonah: Yeah that makes some sense. Be interesting to see how it does.

The anecdote about my friend is completely true, and it’s not the first time I have referred someone to the site.

A few weeks ago, a relatively tech-savvy friend was ruing the fact that there was no central repository for all the big sports news stories on the web. (ESPN ignored several smaller sports on its homepage.) I recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds of several sports sites, but my friend wanted a much easier way to get his news. The Alltop Sports page solved his problems.

Alltop makes you yearn for more

It may be too “dumb” for the geeks, but there is a large portion of the internet-using public that aren’t using tools like RSS but still are pretty comfortable with using the web and browsing extensively. Alltop is perfect for them.

The best part of it all will be the time when those same people using Alltop will stop and say, “I wish there was some way I could customize this page.” As soon as that time comes, these people will become new potential users of tools like RSS, Netvibes, and iGoogle. And that, if I may say so, will be a good day for the web.

Alltop is the first step — easy, fun, and seemingly harmless — to turn dabblers into hardcore users. Support groups to follow.