iGoogle vs. Alltop
Finding read-worthy material in the endless vat of news sites, blogs, wikis, reviews and tweets that now clog the arteries of the internet has become increasingly difficult as the number of internet users around the globe approaches 2 billion.
How do I sort through the slush?! Where is all the good stuff, the meat, the substance, the newsworthy?!!
Enter stage left iGoogle and Alltop.
Two evolving and customizable solutions for squeezing the internet into a neat and orderly front page of feeds and highlights of all the juicy stuff you like. Here’s my quick rundown and synopsis of which of these sites are better:
Alltop was masterminded by the son of a rich and poor dad - Guy Kawasaki. The premise is to get all the top stories (get it?) in one easy to read place. The top 5 articles of whatever feeds you choose will be displayed. Some categories you can choose from include ecommerce, religion, and yoga. Once inside a particular category you can add any feeds listed to your personalized ‘MyAlltop’ tab. It’s easy to find feeds worth adding and there is plenty of content to choose from.
iGoogle functions in much the same way, except you can pretty much add anything you want to your personalized Google page. The functionality is more similar to app happy facebook, where you can find all sorts of cool bobbles called ‘gadgets’ to add to your page, not just feeds. Some gadgets are productive like the local weather or a to do list, others are just for giggles like hangman or joke of the day. And the list of gadgets is indeed as endless as your imagination.
So what’s my take on the two? iGoogle over Alltop.
iGoogle has the user friendliness you would expect from a company poised to take over the universe. Its way too easy to personalize, add, delete, and organize your home page with minimal effort. Alltop on the other hand is in my opinion a little bulky to navigate and customize. And besides, you can’t keep a pet hamster on your homepage like on iGoogle. And I need that.
There’s just no comparison to the ease and functionality of the allpowerful iGoogle.
So what are your thoughts? Have I got it all wrong?
November 11th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Yet both have the same problem: after a while you have so many tabs full of news that the whole exercise on trying to access relevant news becomes moot.
As Guy quotes on his blogs, it’s not about information overload, it’s about filtering …
To read the news, an approach like that of Red Panda’s contextual browser seems much more interesting.
December 12th, 2009 at 1:09 am
The filter approach is clearly valuable. Having some level of human editing to uncover best stuff on the Web is helpful.
What’s missing is an industry filter.
For instance, we created HedgeFundPulse.com to give users a view of the industry at a glance. It is amazing how much someone can take in by simply scanning the hedge fund industry headlines on one page. (Including top Twitter accounts!)
We also went one step further and incorporated a custom search engine that includes thousands of industry specific sites. The results are far more relevant that the typical search and it enables filtering out the garbage.