Truemors: The Rumor Is No Updates in a Month
Truemors is a place to share rumors that you hear. We reviewed the service when it launched nearly two years. Trumeors was started by very popular web personality Guy Kawasaki and was sold to NowPublic for an undisclosed sum.
Context & Ripple Effects
Truemors was one of 2007's most-watched micro-launches: Guy Kawasaki built the rumor-sharing site as a deliberately cheap Web 2.0 experiment and later broke down its costs in his candid build-cost post. After an undisclosed sale to NowPublic, the service has now sat without updates for a month — the classic quiet fade of an acquired niche community.
First-order effects
- Truemors' contributors and readers are left on a stagnant platform; with no shipped changes since the 2007 launch cycle ended, the site's community has no signal that NowPublic intends to keep investing in it.
- NowPublic's acquisition now reads as a traffic-and-community grab rather than a product bet — the buyer inherited an audience but has visibly deprioritized the product itself.
Second-order effects
- For Kawasaki's personal brand, the stall compounds the reception of Alltop, which critics panned at launch — two consecutive ventures underperforming pressures the 'famous founder guarantees traction' narrative he embodied.
- Other small community sites weighing acquisition offers now have a cautionary data point: selling can mean the roadmap ends the day the deal closes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Web 2.0-era acquisition market increasingly prices niche sites on their existing audience rather than their future product — encouraging a buy-and-shelve model where independent communities lose autonomy without gaining development resources.
- Celebrity-founder launches may come to be judged less on launch buzz and more on post-exit stewardship, raising the bar for what founders owe communities they sell.
The trend: This is one data point in the broader consolidation of Web 2.0, where small founder-built community sites get absorbed into larger media platforms and quietly maintained rather than developed.