Am I Famous Now…

Much has been written in the last days around Truemors, the rumor site launched by Guy Kawasaki, also by me.

But the whole wreckage situation was no surprise, actually I would be very surprised if Guy didn’t expect, or even plan this.
What’s better than some buzz? Was it all negative press?

Surely, as Guy himself states in the comments on my post at AIFN, verdicts were harsh. Very harsh. But was that bad?

Of course not! Little A-Lister land and all the compulsary stalking traffic whores wannabes have covered Truemors on more than 200 different sites already and that in only 2 weeks!
Remember, topic is a newly launched, IMNSHO low-profile web site, with a bad choice of technology (WP) running in the background, and not some $1 Billion acquisition.
But Guy Kawasaki is a well known and respected person, with many years of reputation, in our techosphere and a successful marketeer too. He speaks at many conferences in front of a critical audience, people pay big bucks to have the chance to hear him speak. And so would I.

It is obvious that everything Guy does, especially online, is meticulously watched and scrutinized. Verdicts will rather be biased and no one will miss the occasion to grab some PageRank hit out if the product isn’t 200% hip.

But here’s a hot detail : Truemors actually is a hot product and could become as popular as Gawker Stalker in Valleyland and maybe also in other areas. The actual problem is that we, the user, we internauts are a bunch of stupid and perpetually flaming a$$holes. In 13 years online, I have seen many, and participated to quite some too, flame wars.
The Usenet was notorious for its flame wars. Even today popular [tech] web communities are just little more than a bunch of flaming no-lifers grabbing every nanosecond of flame fame. Suffice to look at [people will hate me for this, but I am used to] Slashdot, Digg, Metafilter and Something Awefull. Of course those all are awesome communities, but often their negative reputation, based on a minority of the usergroup, is almost as big as their level of awesomeness.

Back to Truemors. If Truemors has benefited momentum so far, it surely was due to the first 24 hours and in little more than a week, Truemors has become a stable platform already with averagely around 150 submissions pro day.
150 Submissions daily surely isn’t bad for something everyone called a failure.

So what went wrong, what created the drama?

Guy Kawasaki

There are several factors here and the first one of course is the person behind. Biased judgment to be expected and brought to you by everyone and myself. No one would have bothered a second if Terry had launched Truemors.

Censorship

I have no problems with moderation, but bloggers are biased, don’t accept censorship and any form of censorship was expected to create drama that soon after Digg and HDDVD.

Wordpress

It is no shame to build a concept, a site other than a blog on WP, but problems were to expect here too. And WP might actually become decisive in Truemors’ success short to mid term. Together with the advantages of WP, such as pinging, SEO, comments, many plugins also come several inconveniences.
WP doesn’t scale well. The AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) level of the site doesn’t play well together with caching and biggest inconvenience on the release day was that several users knew the loopholes, loopholes freely obtained together with a public and freely available vote plugin, and soon the rankings were gamed.
IMHO Truemors will need a leaner, and more database optimized platform to be successful in the long run, especially if the site will continue to grow. Maybe Django could be an interesting platform of choice. Lean code and dbase queries can very well be minimized and last but not least a very active and continuously growing community.

Users

And then of course there were the users.

Many factors, but obviously Truemors is Web2.0 Beta still in its child days and will probably grow in the right direction over the next months.

And now THE detail. The question. What would I do?
Guy, here’s my answer. Short and simple.

If I had your name/fame, of course I’d whip out a Truemors for less than $15k. Low investment, attention guaranteed and even if the site is only semi decent there will always be users just because it’s You.
Add to that some sure small ad deals and a guaranteed good PageRank. Even if it fails, it would still sell at Sitepoint for more than $15k. Maybe not the thing to write on my resume, but it would still be a pretty sure thing. ;-)