I admire Guy Kawasaki and love The art of start. I'd recommend his book to anybody who has ever dreamt of starting anything. So when he announced his latest venture today, I was all ears. It's called alltop. A concept so simple that it'd make you think how come nobody thought of this before... well some people sure did. Ever heard of live.com, my yahoo, igoogle or....? Well there are hundreds of them out there.

Though not original, I would certainly not undermine the idea of an rss aggregator with links culled for the mass market. I am one of those people who use Live.com as their default homepage and rss reader and since switching to live.com I have hardly ever spent time looking for interesting stuff to read in my spare time. Having all your favorite sites at your fingertips the moment you open your browser can be very addictive. I spent a few weeks gathering the feeds that I liked and Alltop saves you the effort by gathering most interesting sites for you. The disappointing part is that I did not see any smart algorithm or customization around the blog selection.

Though it looks quite obvious and simple, I'm sure Guy has plans for the site but in the mean time if you want to beat him to a startup, head to live.com and start customizing your home page. In terms of look and feel, live.com home page is at least as good as alltop, if not better. Here's a comparative screen capture of live (on left) and alltop (on right).

live alltop