Comments on: Truemors: Guy Kawasaki’s useless website that comes with a $12,000 price tag

By: Truemors Launches

Truemors Launches — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 02:14:42 +0000

[...] Truemors: Guy Kawasaki’s useless website that comes with a $12,000 price tag | King Gary [...]

By: Gary King

Gary King — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 23:24:41 +0000

Paul, it’s this plugin: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

By: Paul Butler

Paul Butler — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:07:50 +0000

Gary King: Indeed, he is a bit naive to allow anyone to post things to the homepage.

By post subscriptions I meant to say comment subscriptions; I mean the emails that I receive when someone comments on a post I have commented on.

By: Gary King

Gary King — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:53:15 +0000

Paul, also I don’t get what kind of moderation Truemors is supposed to have. On Digg, articles are shown on the homepage only if they have reached a certain threshold; this isn’t the case on Truemors, so people can submit whatever they want. I just submitted something to test with, and it was displayed on the homepage immediately. That’s just silly!

By: Gary King

Gary King — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:48:14 +0000

David, it probably was Digg.

Paul, I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘post subscription’?

By: David

David — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:02:08 +0000

I read about it on the creator’s blog. I don’t remember where I found the link though. Possibly Digg.

By: Paul Butler

Paul Butler — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:33:20 +0000

Guy defended his spending $4,000 in legal fees today in a follow-up post. He says that the trademark, terms of use, etc. were why he needed legal fees. The problem is that those things do not add value to a site if the community is not there.

I checked the site again today, and the entries have improved a lot in quality. Hopefully it will go well for him, I’m sure he could use the money :).

Btw. Gary, is the post subscriptions thing you are using a plugin, or is it built into WordPress? It does a great job of bringing me back to the site constantly.

By: Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas. » Guy Kawasaki post on $12K to build a Web 2.0 Startup

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 05:56:18 +0000

[...] It’s $12k too much More on my thoughts here: http://www.kinggary.com/archives/truemors-guy-kawasakis-useless-website-that-comes-with-a-12000-pric... [...]

By: Gary King

Gary King — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:59:56 +0000

David,

Where’d you read it? For a site like this, I’m not surprised that it would be mentioned outside of web 2.0 circles because it has more of a general appeal than sites like Digg. Entertainment sites have a far wider reach than tech sites.

By: David

David — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:50:52 +0000

Weird, I was just reading an article about that site yesterday.

By: Gary King

Gary King — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:54:46 +0000

Paul,

Very true. Although, cost has absolutely no correlation with success, which I know you already know.

By: Paul Butler

Paul Butler — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:37:44 +0000

It’s funny because it seems like he is trying to imitate digg’s success, yet (IIRC) digg was built for 1/5th of what truemors was.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:56:48 +0000

You know, I can’t fault Guy on this. Not only is he solving a problem social people have — helping them with small-talk at parties so they seem knowledgeable and interesting — but he’s doing exactly what entrepreneurs are supposed to do — testing new ideas in the market. Maybe Truemors will fail, but, when the cost is only $12k, it’s reasonable to try an idea that probably will!

To me, the mistake here may be making the site available to the Internet at large, instead of, say, the members of his local Toastmasters chapter. I wouldn’t trust the Digg approach to filter the rumors for truth, considering how few people actually read articles on Slashdot.

By: Chris Garrett

Chris Garrett — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 10:41:20 +0000

It’s another case where people focus on the price but not the value. Take away the celebrity name and the “web2.0 site” would never have gained any traction. Perhaps had the bill been higher he would have thought longer about the service he was providing, some times costs are a good thing as they make you actually plan a strategy! Having said that, at least he didn’t launch with a superbowl ad featuring a sock puppet