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.

Twitter is more than just status updates

I am, what some may call, a Twitter evangelist. I preach the gospel of Twitter to everyone I meet. Most people look at me in confusion.

Today, my work has been made easier.

Thanks to the great folks at CommonCraft, I can now show people a simple video that explains Twitter in everyday English.

Once you’re done watching the video, go sign up for a Twitter account and then let me know so I can add you as a follower. Then, come back and read why Twitter is so much more than what you saw on the video.

Twitter is conversation, links, and ideas

Once you get used to the status update functionality of Twitter, the next logical step is discovering how the service is an excellent tool for asynchronous conversation. Like those in a chat room (from the old days of the internet), your conversations on Twitter are (usually) open to the public. This allows for fresh infusions of ideas and it also allows facilitates the discovery of new people to follow who have similar interests or stimulating ideas.

Conversation, undoubtedly, leads to ideas that reside outside the Twitter framework. This, in fact, is what I believe is the true power of Twitter: the ability to share links and ideas to people that want to engage with those same links and ideas.

Slowly, Twitter has been replacing my RSS reader as my main way of discovering good content. Essentially, following good people on Twitter lets me have access to personally-selected curators of the web, leading me to new places with every link they post.

What’s great about this targeted link-sharing is that the conversational aspect of Twitter comes back into play, allowing users to engage and interact with the links and content being shared.

Twitter is what you make it

I know people that are using Twitter for many other reasons than the ones I outlined above. In the end, Twitter isn’t just what you see in the video (though it’s definitely a great starting point) — instead, Twitter is anything you want to make of the most addictive asynchronous messaging platform to come about in years.

So go sign up and let me know so I can follow you.