Anyone that follows Guy Kawasaki knows that he has two websites and he is a former Apple evangelist.  Kawasaki launched two websites: Truemors and AllTop.  Truemors was acquired by NowPublic around July 2008 and AllTop was launched about 5 months before that.

Kawasaki launched AllTop by paying engineers roughly $10,000 and he describes it as “an online magazine rack.”  When it launched initially, many people did not see the point of it because it just seems like a collection of Kawasaki’s favorite sites about certain categories.  Nobody could customize AllTop and that is what people seem to want based on looking at the successes of Netvibes and iGoogle.  Hence there was a plethora of negative reviews.

Kawasaki wants to return with a vengeance.  “‘MyAlltop’ coming in six weeks,” wrote Kawasaki on his Twitter account.  That’s right, everybody.  AllTop will be customizable in the next release.   Should competitors be worried?  Kawasaki has quite a bit of marketing power on Twitter and based on his reputation so if I was Netvibes and iGoogle I’d keep my eyes peeled.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Guy Kawasaki is one of the best motivational speakers.  But when it comes to web ideas, I think Alltop is just a terrible idea.  Alltop aggregates content from the best blogs and news sources out there.  Essentially Alltop piggybacks the hard work of writers.  The blogs that Alltop aggregates gets linked to, but who cares?  TechCrunch writer, Don Reisinger drank the Kool-Aid and stated that Alltop’s redesign makes the site a lot better.  Maybe Don didn’t get the memo from Arrington that Alltop is “just a big pile of nothing.”

What has been redesigned by Alltop?  Now all the sites that Alltop links to can be found by categorization and search.  The reason why I don’t think Alltop is useful is because it lacks customization.  Alltop only shows you what they think are good news sources.  Almost every major search engine company out there is investing millions of dollars to create homepage customization.  I’d rather make Netvibes or PageFlakes or Google Reader my homepage than Alltop. 

If anyone feels that there is any good reason why I should use Alltop as my homepage instead of a customizable homepage, leave it in a comment.  I haven’t changed my opinion since Alltop started.

Guy Kawasaki’s newest brainchild, Alltop.com, recently launched. According to Guy, Alltop is an ‘online magazine rack’ what ever that means. Not too long ago, Guy had also launched Truemors. Truemors was doomed from day one. I think Alltop may also share Truemors’ fate.

Alltop basically aggregates recent posts and news from top online publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the NYT. The site’s technology is nothing buzz-worthy. There is no popularity algorithm programmed into the site. Alltop is essentially a RSS reader without the option to select feed sources.  Alltop.com’s architecture is seemingly so simple, it would take any good developer less than a day to replicate the site.

Alltop is an absurdly unnecessary addition to the already crowded online news and blogs aggregation space. Alltop will most likely gain some traction in the beginning because of Guy’s ‘star-power’ but I have no doubt that it will eventually fade into Web 2.0′s black hole.