I have recently had my site (the one your on right now) accepted by Alltop. For anyone that has not heard of Alltop; from the Alltop about page:
We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web.
The interface is a extremely easy to use and the concept is great because there is a quality filter as to what is shown on the site. (Yes I’m bias. I just made it on!). They make it very obvious as to why the site is successful:
The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.
A similar sentiment was shared by the founders Martin May and Brady Becker of Brightkite when I asked them how they accounted for their rapid rise to success. The impact that Twitter, which just sent its billionth tweet, is having on communication and the dissemination of information, is nothing short of a a paradigm shift (even without a definable business model). Businesses are clamoring to be mentioned/included in services like Twitter and/or sites like Alltop.
I’ve posted about the concept of location based services, geotargeting and Twitter being used to create mobile conduit marketing and yet Brightkite and Alltop are creating a more elemental form of conduit marketing. This is, as Trent Reznor put it; “ . . . not f___ing marketing“. It is the recommendation economy.
The real issue for Twitter and Alltop (stop me if you’ve heard this one a million times before) is how to monetize the site. I have some thoughts on that and will flesh them out in a later post.
