The Meaning of Truemors - in Guy’s Own Words at Idea Tagging

The Meaning of Truemors - in Guy’s Own Words

Published by IdeaTagging.com May 16th, 2007 in General Posts, Web/tech, Blog

I have heard Guy Kawasaki preach that business ideas and startups must have real meaning. I asked him (via a comment on one of his blog posts) what meaning there was in Truemors. My question and his response are below:

My Question:

“Guy, I first read about Truemors a day after watching one of your videos in which you preached that startup ideas must have meaning. I took this to mean that a business idea must serve a really meaningful purpose, so I must admit that I was a little surprised to read about Truemors and thought where is the deep meaning in gossip! But then I thought, let’s wait and see - there may well be more to it. So is there Guy? By the way, I am also working on an idea that I think some people might initially react negatively too, but as you say - I am going for it all the same.”

Guy’s Response:

“People somehow think that rumors are evil. I don’t. There are good ones and bad ones, true ones and untrue ones.

Here’s the meaning: Truemors is one more step in the democratization of information. It started with royalty and religious leaders and their scribes. Then there were printing presses–eg, for the Bible. Then desktop publishing. Then web sites. Then blogs.

More and more, one needs less and less to tell the world something. Truemors takes it another step. You don’t have to create a web site or a blog–eg, what if you only have a few tidbits every once in a while? You can’t maintain a site or blog for this.

Now there’s Truemors. At a minimum, you just need a phone to leave a voicemail or send a text message and you can tell the world. How cool is that? That’s the meaning of Truemors: power to the people.

Guy”

Seems to me that Guy must have got his inspiration from Twitter and you can perhaps begin to understand his likely train of thought in coming up with this idea. Twitter proves that there is ‘value’ in enabling the exchange of little bits of information and more than anything else, that a lot people have plenty of spare time on their hands.

If people are willing to spend their time following each other’s goings and comings on Twitter then why wouldn’t they spend time peddling rumours? Having said that, it has been suggested that Truemors makes Twitter look good.

By the way, I don’t know if the site does this but perhaps the initiator of a particularly high-profile rumour could get rewarded in some way if the rumour turned out to be true. This could perhaps be used as an incentive to get some ‘quality’ ~~rumours~~ truemors amongst the tripe that is bound to dominate the site.

My guess is that Truemors could yet prove popular if it can get rid of the spammers that have apparently stormed the site. It’s not my cup of tea though, but then again neither is Twitter.