VentureBeat

When Guy Kawasaki started Truemors, a site for spreading Internet rumors, his intentions weren’t quite clear. Was it an experiment? A joke? The product of too much free time? Or perhaps not too much time — after all, it didn’t look like the site had taken much effort to create. “The plan is simple,” Kawasaki wrote at the time. “Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).”

Get it launched he did, for a whopping price tag of $12,107.09. And the site quickly garnered its first rave review, duly noted by Kawasaki: “Worst website ever discovered,” read a headline at the Inquirer. Here at VentureBeat, we paused to note that the site was smothered in spam.

But somehow, over the next year, Truemors appears to have cleaned up its act. Traffic to the site looks decent, if uninspiring. And, no rumors here, the site has been acquired by well-funded citizen journalism site NowPublic.

No price was given, and it seems unlikely that a great deal was paid; for that matter, no great effort was made to announce the acquisition. But on an investment of $12,000, who’s complaining? Kawasaki also gets to join the board of NowPublic, which suggests that it was at least more than chump change. Now he just has to sell Alltop, a feed aggregator he launched this year.

Below is a Compete traffic graph for both NowPublic and Truemors. Note that it includes only United States visitors; many of the two sites’ contributors, and readers, are in other countries.

Guy Kawasaki’s new company Truemors, has launched, and it is a sort of Twitter for rumors.

It is noteworthy, because its a raw experiment at letting anyone post anything and letting the top-voted post float to the top in a section called “greatest.”

However, the site has been overrun largely by nonsense and spam — for example, rumors that a war is going to break out in the Middle East, to spam for “Sportiki” and “Dafun.”

Here’s how it works: You can call in a message to Truemors (or you text, or email), and leave your rumor. Kawasaki, a long-time consultant and investor in start-ups, was philosophical about the negative response even in the chatter leading up to the launch.

There’s a lesson here. The site had no focus, and thus no community. A moderator is also a good idea for such sites, because otherwise spam will prevail. There may still be hope for the “greatest” section of the site, where the most popular posts are ranked, and thus presumably only the best material is sifted. When we last looked, however, the top post was about how terrible Truemors is (update: the post has since been deleted). The site is worth watching, but as of now, a long shot.

Screenshot below:

Here’s the latest action:

YouTube follows through, almost — YouTube tomorrow (Friday) will start sharing advertising revenue with select video content creators, though not with the masses yet. The move to share revenue with users had been signaled in the past. The initial bunch includes Lonelygirl15, LisaNova, HappySlip, renetto, Smosh, and valsartdiary, Newteevee reports. However, no specifics are mentioned.

Yahoo Photos to be phased out — Yahoo will announce the closure of Yahoo Photos tomorrow, which will occur over a few months. Users will be shunted to the hipper Flickr, which has just overtaken Yahoo Photo in traffic. Techcrunch has the Comscore data and news.

Joost launches to public, but broken — Too bad for Joost, the new Internet TV company started by co-founders of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. They’ve impressively crafted hype around this throughout its development, only to have it crash upon launch. They apparently weren’t ready to handle traffic needs. Bottom line, it says something about lack of preparation, because the ability to scale is crucial. Happened to us at VentureBeat when we launched. Toni Schneider of Automattic/Wordpress says many people neglect scale; Wordpress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, he said, goes to bed every night thinking about how to scale. The problem killed Friendster.

Did Silverlight, Microsoft’s new Web platform, change the world? — People are debating just how significant the software giant’s new tools will become. Robert Scoble has some good interviews with the Microsoft team (click on image left). Finally, the Microsoft guys say, “real applications” can be built within in a browser — no more javascript, HTML. And then there’s the impressive media support.

Big-brother nation — Video surveillance technologies are getting more advanced, some would say creepily so. Companies use them to crack down on employees slouching off at at work and other abuse. 3VR, of San Francisco, offers that. Its software recognizes employees and follows them around as the come and go. There’s Pixim in Mountain View, which can take video in dark, shady places, and NiceVision, in Rutherford, N.J, which searches for “unusual’ activity, as in un-patterned. See Merc story. The Brits are considering introducing a lip-reading technology for its pervasive surveillance cameras.

Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple marketing specialist-come-VC, is restless — He’s looking for bloggers and paparazzi in the flow of interesting rumors, for a Twitter-like service. He explains on his blog: “They would be folks who can provide ’scoops’ that begin with a phrase like, ‘Did you hear that…?’ For example, did you hear that Angelina Jolie just adopted another child?” Apparently, the venture will be called Truemors. That URL has a cached version with a phone number, 650-329-2020, and a Twitter-like message: “I saw Guy Kawasaki at the Stanford Park Hotel.” Apparently a reverse-Twitter: Messages about what others are doing.

Apple’s Steve Jobs vows to go green — Under pressure from shareholders to hold to more stringent recycling guidelines, and eliminate toxic chemicals such as mercury, Steve Jobs has vowed to get better. This is encouraging. Apple has been a laggard, I found out when reporting on the recycling habits of major computer companies. Having Al Gore on his board probably added to the pressure on Jobs to do something.

Boo.com bought by new owner — The dot-com company that epitomized excesses of the boom, Boo.com, a flashy online clothing retailer that was difficult to use, burned through $125 million in capital. It has now been bought, and made part of a travel site, reports the Financial Times.

Breakthrough on solar cells? — That’s what Rice University is saying about its project on quantum dot technology. This is essentially a press release; we haven’t confirmed how significant this is.

Calacanis project not as broadly ambitious as earlier implied – We pointed to rumors entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, backed by high-powered venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, is creating a search engine that crosses Wikipedia with Google — a compelling idea. As mentioned, it was just speculation. Now there are more facts dribbling out: The start-up is reportedly called Kokua, and mix of Wikipedia and podcasting, with a focus on automobiles and video games. This is more focused, and possibly still attractive, given the possibility of targeting ads, but more predictable too.

Techdirt launches Insight Community — At the Plug&Play Expo this week, Techdirt showed off the testing version of its new service, just launched. We mentioned it last year here. It solicits the input of expert bloggers in niche fields to inform a corporate client in areas in which the client is interested. Techdirt wants Insight to outperform traditional analyst work for Fortune 500 companies. After receiving funding from entrepreneur Mark Fletcher and others, it’s looking to raise another round.

IBM saves Moore’s Law — IBM unveiled today a breakthrough in chip design to reduce power loss. Called “airgap,” the technology will use nanotechnology to insulate wiring in the chip. An IBM senior vice president crows: “I think it extends Moore’s Law another decade or so.” It follows other reportedly significant breakthroughs by Intel and IBM earlier this year to reduce power loss.

Spock launches private testing version — We’ve written a lot about Spock, the people search engine. It has just launched its private beta version, and it’s the first time I’ve had free access to the service without one of the founders controlling the demo. I checked out my profile, and it has pretty relevant tags on me, noting that I’m a blogger, related to VentureBeat, and have some affiliation with the Mercury News (the newspaper, my former employer, syndicates VentureBeat content), and so on. No insulting tags, yet.

It takes you through an initial sign up stage, where you can type in your logins to services like Gmail, LinkedIn and other services so that you can automatically reach contacts if say, you land on their profile page and want to reach them. Past coverage.