Personalized start page service Pageflakes today announced that their "Pagecasts" feature, which allows users to share their Pageflakes pages with the public or a specific group of users, has been used to push out 100,000 Pagecasts. They also announced the release of their Pagecasts directory which allows people to more easily find user pages.
While this announcement seems fairly insignificant, the quick uptake of the Pagecasts feature is really good news for the startup. One of their chief competitors, Netvibes, offers a similar feature called "Universes" that so far has only been used 156 times (or just over 3700 times if you count shared tabs).
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Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen might have been laying it on a bit thick when he told us stories about people using Pagecasts to educate students, voice political opinions and even of "children being adopted from Africa" (though Pagecasts are indeed being used in those ways), but there is still something potentially important about this service. Rafe Needleman hit the nail on the head, when he pointed out that people could use Pagecasts to more or less create their own Original Signal-like information aggregator.
Pageflakes is also working on their new "Blizzard" update coming in June, which will add greater customization tools (an area where the service currently lags behind some of their competitors) and long-awaited Safari support for Mac users.
Pageflakes 'Blizzard' update will add better customization options.