What is Truemors? If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, Truemors is the ugly younger cousin of Digg — you know, the one that doesn’t make up for mediocre looks with a sparkling personality. It’s the latest brainchild of Guy Kawasaki — serial entrepreneur, former Apple evangelist and all around entertaining speaker.

The blogosphere has developed quite a distaste for this product. It is a news submission site that lets you email, call in or post from a web form any rumor that you’ve run across. On top of that and in typical Web 2.0 fashion you can vote these rumors up, and the most highly voted rumors get a special place on the page. The entire thing was built in Wordpress for less than $15,000. The question is, does it actually provide any real value for consumers? The general impression is, no.

Who’s That Guy?

Founder of Garage Ventures, Former Apple Evangelist, Most Likely To Kill Your Public Speaker Budget, Generally Interesting Entrepreneur. For everything else, I’ll leave it to Guy to tell you himself.

The Masses Speak

Everyone seems to have an opinion on this product, and most of those opinions parrot the same basic premise — Guy is using his years of credibility to prop up a sinking ship, and soon enough the world will recognize this and sink Truemors into the dead pool.

Seriously — Truemors makes Digg look like a collaborative effort to reproduce the works of Shakespeare. –Matthew Ingram

Truemors does not reveal new lessons, it shows Guy needing to rationalize bad PR, something he hasn’t faced so acutely before. –Valleywag

While he seems to be proud of the fact that there was no VC money involved with the project (See Step 2) the truth of the matter is that regardless of how some VC investment may be off the wall this one probably would have been left stillborn in the VC waiting room. –WinExtra

Guy isn’t renowned for great monetization, but the domain alone is probably worth $15-$20k even if it only has a trickle of new links coming in. I have a feeling links will just keep flowing. –Andy Beard

Web 2.0 Roundup

Bingo Andy. Here is my list of reason’s why Truemors will be worth more than almost anyone in the community seems to give it credit for.

0 dollars. The amount of money that Guy has spent advertising his useless new chimera.

Twelve. The number of new stories about Truemors appearing in the blogosphere every hour or so.

8%. The likelihood that this site will have any real negative effect on Guy Kawasaki’s reputation.

$250,000. The aggregate income from speaking arrangements Guy will book directly resulting from the Truemors launch.

6. Truemor’s Page Rank the next time that GoogleBot decides to make a visit.

245 seconds. The number of seconds it will take from the moment he courts advertisers to the time he makes up his initial investment.

18 days. The average attention span of a webizen, especially when they only have obscure reasons for being annoyed.

53. The number of tech bloggers that will be eating their hats when Truemor’s 2.0 launches with a serious usability overhaul.

I haven’t counted Guy out of this one quite yet, it’s as likely as not that he’s just doing what he always has — banking on the fact that promotion and prestige in the Web 2.0 landscape can bolster any project until the programmers get a chance to make it a reality. Six months from now, he’ll likely be laughing his way right to the bank.

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