Comments for Poll: Do Personalized Start Pages have a viable future?

Poll: Do Personalized Start Pages have a viable future?

2006-09-13T09:16:05Z

In our latest poll, we're asking what you think of Personalized Start Pages as an ongoing business. Accel VC Judy Gibbons said in our interview that personalized start pages are under-hyped:

"Personal home pages like PageFlakes & Netvibes [...] represent the third generation of Internet usage: first portals because there was little content and it was hard to find; second search because there was an ever increasing amount of content if you could only track it down; now personalized ‚Äòpull‚Äô home pages, because most sophisticated users know what content and apps they want to check into every day - and they want these brought to them to improve productivity."

Do you agree? Let us know by selecting one of the choices below...

You may also want to check out previous R/WW posts on start pages: Business Models For Start Pages and The Future of Personalized Start Pages.

Comment from Sebastian on 2006-09-13

2006-09-13T10:03:10Z

they WILL have a future, but there will be just a little number of big startpages, which will be Live.com, iGoogle, Yahoo.

there will be a niche market for Netvibes, Pageflakes and others.

But most of the users won't use personalized startpages at all, because they don't care and won't look for gadgets, and stuff.

I think that there will be a market for the big corporations, providing automatically configured personalized startpages. for example: yahoo tracks what you use on their portal, and presents you a startpage which gives you faster/easier access to this information.

Comment from Joel Hoard on 2006-09-13

2006-09-13T15:47:34Z

I wish the poll had more of a middle ground...I think a few start pages will survive (once they get a more viable revenue model) but most of them won't make it. I wouldn't say they would be "consigned to the web 2.0 scrap heap" per se...I think the time required to make them will reduce and as a result several will hang around for a long time and be very valuable to some people (personally I live and die by my netvibes).

In the future we might start seeing niche start pages (just for doctors, technologists, etc) and a lot more small and private start pages popping up (like what happened with wikis). Either way, I think the concept is sound and won't be going anywhere for awhile. I don't think start page companies will all be wildly successful or aquired for millions, but they won't exactly go the way of pets.com either.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2006-09-13

2006-09-13T22:00:01Z

Thanks guys for your interesting perspectives. Joel, I'd say your view is in line with option 1: "they will be successful stand-alone businesses". Perhaps I should've added "some of them...".

Comment from rickdog on 2006-09-14

2006-09-15T02:47:40Z

They attempt to provide in widgets what "standard" webpages provide in a page, and the widgets always fall short of the functionality and usability of their corresponding webpages. What I'd like to see is browser support for MDI (Multi Doc Interface) on a viewport. Frames and iframes somewhat do this, but I'd rather have the ability to take multiple webpages of my favorite services, utilities, etc as native documents, all contained within a single page viewport. That way it'd could have my startpage contain any webpage and get full functionality. Services such as Google search and Mail could provide "squished" page rendering for this, like with mobile or palm PC.