Guy Kawasaki vs me
March 4th, 2008 | by Sajal Kayan |Alexa traffic graphs never ceases to amaze me.
This graph speaks a thousand words…
alltop.com is the latest website by Guy Kawasaki which was launched on twitter and has been made using a lot of feedback from his twitter followers. If you follow @guykawasaki’s twitter page, you can see evangelism in live action. Basically alltop is a RSS aggregator where there are various categories like Celebs, Egos, Gadgets, etc etc.. Each category is a page and it shows links to last 5 posts from important Blogs/Websites in the specific niche.
The idea is probably quite lame, but it all depends on who started it. Scrolling on the page is really slow for me, so is any pages which has a portion of it fixed via CSS, that’s probably some issue with minefield(Firefox 3 beta). Moreover, if I wanted to read about stuff in there, I could simply add the stuff(only the ones I’m interested in) on my Google Reader using Google’s nice, fast and Ajax interface and not be limited to last 5 posts. Perhaps what would be more helpful would be a Yet-another-RSS-Directory 
.
However the point of this post is not to thrash the concept, it is to demonstrate that when popular people are involved in pushing something, it gets a large starting user base, them some of them leave the site after the initial hype, but success may be measured only when the site can still maintain constant flow of visitors, which Guy has demonstrated very well.
I am a great admirer of Guy Kawasaki, OK! I admit I don’t have him on my Google reader, but he is definitely one of the top evangelists around. Just getting so many visitors on this silly concept is a testimonial to evangelism. I need a lot of evangelism to get my upcoming travel portal popular once it is ready. When I grow up I wanna be like Guy Kawasaki.
If you too wanna be like him, follow him on twitter( http://twitter.com/guykawasaki ) and start learning. He makes it a point to reply to everyone, even if he missed your query/comment he will still dig it out and reply to it later(even one week delay as someone told me).
3 Responses to “Guy Kawasaki vs me”
By mk on Mar 14, 2008 | Reply
I definitely agree that the concept is trash. I don’t expect this from someone like him. Anyway, Sajal, you have right point about popularity and evangelism.
By Sajal Kayan on Mar 14, 2008 | Reply
Yes mk, the true marketing genius lies in turning a crap concept into a success. Most of us have excellent new ideas everyday, but unable to implement or market it. Guy has created so much buzz about it that there is a scope for highly targeted advertisements on alltop.
By Lakshmi Mareddy on Mar 28, 2008 | Reply
Sajal, Thanks for dropping by.
Just like how George Bush has given confidence to the average guy out there [Now even ny son wants to be President!], Kawasaki has a higher purpose, that of instilling confidence into people like me, who have ideas, but are hesitant after some time [as we self critic, and weed out the lame ideas, and are therefore left without an idea itself!.]
So its about taking everything to the market, and crossing your fingers and praying that someone will kiss this “froglike concept”, and turn it into a “Prince” of a product..
Rgds