Alltop Launches a New iPhone Interface

Matthew Campbell, July 27th, 2009

This will probably be of some interest to you as an iPhone developer & user – the website Alltop has created an iPhone optimized version of their website.

You can check it out here: http://iphone.alltop.com/.

Alltop is essentially a aggregator of blog feeds – it is different than some of the automated services or a Google search in that there is a human powered selection process. Blog site owners need to submit their sites and Alltop staff need to approve the site (from what I can tell based on how I got my own site listed there). This makes Alltop a little different from other sites like digg that simply use an algorithmic madness of crowds to drive all the content.

Here is what they do in their own words,

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

If you want some more details about what they are trying to do with the RSS Reader capability that they are trying to put into there site see Guy Kawasaki’s original blog post, How to Read Your Favorite RSS Feeds On an iPhone.