Guy Kawasaki (of Truemors fame) launched a new cheapass (10000 bucks) startup: Alltop. The only problem is: it’s not a startup. It’s nothing more than an extended version of Popurls (they admit it in the upper right corner where it says “Inspired by Popurls), which is in turn a nice enough RSS aggregator simply because it came early, but let’s face it, it’s a static version of Netvibes.

So, where does that leave Alltop? Nowhere, really. Absolutely no one would report on this one if Guy Kawasaki wasn’t behind it, and next time, they probably won’t.

Now, the interesting thing about this story is not the site itself, but the fact that this is one of those situations where you think to yourself: what the hell were they thinking? What was Guy thinking when he announced Alltop? What is he hoping for; how does he hope to gain readership for this thing, how does he plan to make money off it, and the like?

Luckily, you actually can learn what Guy was thinking in Kristen’s video interview with Guy, embedded below.

My interpretation is that Guy is thinking that RSS is a concept that the majority of internet users don’t understand (which is correct,) that folks who are new to RSS don’t want to bother to find all the feeds that they might be interested in (also correct,) however, everyone wants to be able to read a lot of information from various sources in a very simple way (partly true), and this is what Alltop provides. Another very positive thing about this project is that it was very, very cheap, and therefore, even if it fails, who cares? You got to congratulate Guy on that one.

There are also problems. One problem is that you cannot just copy a site (Popurls), add some non-essential improvements (more feeds) and think that you’ll achieve the same level of success as the original. It just doesn’t work that way, and it’s hard to explain why, but it just doesn’t.

And even if it did, a company like Netvibes can simply publish a customized page which would show the exact same feeds, only with all the benefits that Netvibes have. In other words, Alltop is replaceable. Easily.

BTW, if you’re interested in something like Alltop, only much better and with much nicer options, check out DailyRotation. They’ve been doing it for years, although the site is focused only on technology.

Secondly, he’s understimating his users. People do care about customization. MySpace users, which are for the most part kids that don’t know much about computers, customize their pages to an extreme extent. Alltop doesn’t even let you see more stories for a particular feed, and that’s the first thing people are gonna miss. Popurls is better with that regard - it gives you some basic customization options.

All in all, I think I know what Guy was thinking when he created Alltop; the idea isn’t all that bad, but the actualization of it is just not good enough.