After a year of aggregating feeds on a pretty large range of topics, Alltop has released personal MyAlltop pages.
MyAlltop - personal alltop pages
What was nice was that existing Alltop users like myself got an email from Guy to give us the chance to secure our usernames before anyone else turned up.
And it’s a reasonably nice and easy set-up – register, log-in, and then visit any existing Alltop category, and simply tick which feeds you wish to include on your own page – then order them by dragging and dropping.
(For reference, this blog appears on Social Media, my Twitter account is on Twitterati, and my other blog, 140char is on Twitter)
And there are now accounts for Dan Thornton, BadgerGravling, TheWayoftheWeb and 140char on My Alltop – although so far, I’ve only had time to add my own feeds and will have to dedicate some time tonight to aggregating my favourite sources to the TheWayoftheWeb and 140Char accounts.
But why?
What’s interesting to me is why they’ve launched personal aggregation – one reason is probably the number of feeds in each category has become a little overwhelming. Guy Kawasaki is claiming the service features 31,000 sources on 550 topics already.
Obviously there is also an SEO benefit in having hundreds of people linking to their personal pages, and it means the service is more likely to get repeated fresh links as people add to their personal pages.
And it might boost usage as some people will prefer their personal aggregation over the category pages.
Plus, bearing in mind Alltop currently serves display advertising, there’s suddenly a lot more real estate being created, promoted and potentially becoming popular.
But:
I’m hoping there are more reasons for launching this new service, in addition to those listed above – otherwise it might not really fly.
As others have rightly pointed out, public and personal aggregators already exist – Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle for starters. Plus options such as Google Reader, which also offers shared items (My shared items are here).
(Incidentally, Marshall Kirkpatrick has been posting some interesting stuff on Netvibes)
And then there are the popularity based aggregators such as SocialMedian, more semantic options like Twine, and the old school (e.g. Digg).
In addition, MyAlltop is hampered slightly by only allowing feeds already listed to be included, and not having any search functionality – meaning you need to skim through some fairly big pages to find your own feeds and any you know/might think are on there.
So what could there be?
Some people might find it slightly simpler to aggregate existing Alltop feeds than on rival services – particularly those who don’t necessarily already know a load of social media bloggers ( for example), and have their RSS feeds in other services.
Then there are the future possible options to include other feeds, display the selection as a widget, flag up favourite posts, perhaps group invidual posts around topics/questions etc, etc.
But from a quick brainstorm, I’m missing what really makes MyAlltop stand out at the moment – so I’m hoping you’ll give me some ideas to include?
