Guy Kawasaki and the Truemors team released a new aggregator service today, called Alltop.com, which lists the top five most recent headlines from a variety of leading sites which are divided up into categories, such as celebrities, politics, and sports.
To me, the headlines are made interesting mostly because of the list of sites that are tracked in Alltop. Because the sites they include are quite active, they can give you a good snapshot of what's going on right now. There's more to it than that, however. In some ways, it's also a recommendation engine: "Here are the sites we think you should consider if you're interested in topic XYZ." I'm sure people digging for new, fruitful sites to visit will enjoy stopping by Alltop.
Now, all of this is different than what Bob and I have been working on with thredr. Our system leans more to a TechMeme-like strategy where the most "active conversations" or "threads" are brought to the top of the list. There's "editorializing" if you will in terms of which sites/feeds are tracked and what the ranking algorithm does, but other than that, like Alltop and TechMeme, it can run unattended. We're also reaching out to more content than just blogs and news sites. For instance, we're including YouTube videos and (as of now) a small set of forums.

Another difference with TechMeme (and it appears AllTop for that matter) is that we're focusing on smaller sets of content (micro-conversations), which brings up its own issues. Fewer feeds mean fewer connections, which can lead to more brittleness if not careful--or boring results. It also means the architecture can be quite different and in fact lends itself to other features which we'll be rolling out over the coming weeks.
I like the looks of AllTop. They're way ahead of what we've been doing and I look forward to seeing how it works out. We only have a development server running at this time and lots of code to write before we sleep. :-)
Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com


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