AJAX homepages - Portals 2.0?
I've been tracking the development of all the personalized start pages that have flowered up over the past year. Live.com, Google Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, PageFlakes, et al. These are services that don't just offer a place to store all your content and links - but house your widgets, gadgets and web services too. I'll be publishing an analysis of the feature sets of the leading services on ZDNet tonight, but I want to set the scene by discussing their growing popularity - which makes for an obvious comparison to portals in the late 90's.
TechCrunch calls them AJAX homepages, because they all use AJAX in the UI. For that reason there's something uniquely 'Web 2.0' about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.
Looking at the 2006 class of portals/personalized pages, there are two distinct groups:
1) The big guns: Microsoft (live.com), Google (Google Personalized Homepage) and Yahoo (My Yahoo, which is still mostly an old-style portal).
2) The little companies: Netvibes, Protopage, PageFlakes and a host of other contenders which I'll mention in my ZDNet post.
In terms of traffic, it's difficult to gauge how the big guns compare to one another. But amongst the little guys Netvibes has been getting all the buzz and early traffic, as this Alexa chart shows:
To put that into perspective though, it's small potatoes compared to live.com:
Update: A source at Microsoft tells me that the Live.com figure on Alexa may include mail.live.com, which gets a lot of traffic. If that's the case, take the following paragraph with a grain of salt...
I added the top web-based RSS Reader Bloglines into the chart to show just how significant Live.com - and Personalized start pages in general - are becoming. Bloglines smokes every other web-based RSS Reader and has been no slug in traffic growth lately, yet it was overtaken in traffic by Live.com after just 1-2 months. In fact Live.com currently has double the amount of traffic of Bloglines! I would imagine Google isn't too far behind Live.com either.
It goes to show how valuable this type of service could be, in terms of traffic and being a 'start page' for users. More grist for the Portals 2.0 mill, because portals too were all about getting 'eyeballs' and traffic.
Incidentally, I have a question for you: where is Yahoo in all this? My Yahoo is more like a dot com portal than a Personalized start page. Aside from the obvious observation that My Yahoo isn't made of AJAX, it's still basically a portal for mostly static content. Yahoo owns one of the leading widget makers, konfabulator (now known as Yahoo! Widgets), but it's not integrated with My Yahoo. Why haven't they joined the 'AJAX homepages' party yet?
UPDATE: I've now posted an Ajax homepages market review on ZDNet.
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I think of Yahoo as a tool more then a Start page. Not a big fan of My Yahoo. It's too crowded, too much information, you cant concentrate on anything.
I like Netvibes but the lack of open API will kill them
Yep, totally agree JP.
Interesting comparison. In terms of the traffic (reach) you might want to consider that we (Pageflakes) launched our beta version just 3 weeks ago. Thus the direct comparison of traffic in terms of reach is a bit misleading. I think a few weeks/months down the track will show a more realistic picture. Also, for low reach figures Alexa is not very accurate (they even say that in their FAQs).
Cheers
Ole
Not to rain on your parade but My Yahoo turned on the AJAX awhile back (ie. drag and drop). Not to mention that it was and still is leading the charge in RSS for the masses. They've also been making some changes here and there like acknowledging podcasts.
Sure they haven't put in the widgets yet, but the other pages widgets are hardly awe-inspiring and consist of things like a calendar and weather which have been done years ago.
Don't get me wrong, MyYahoo has done some great stuff over the past year - RSS, podcasts, adding a squeeze of ajax (not that much though...). But I think you're underestimating the importance of widgets Ran. Once we get to more complex (and much more useful) widgets like live.com's upcoming TV recommendations one - that's the level of functionality that will really make ajax homepages a killer service.
I wonder how Google's IG compares?
What about goowy in all of this...take a look we have the same rss feeds, weather, news, stocks, etc but we also offer email, contacts, calendaring, integrated IM and virtual storage coming soon.
www.goowy.com
Taking the mail.live.com point one step further, Live.com should actually be near the bottom using alexa's data. Alexa claims that live.com is only responsible for 10% of the live.com traffic, while mail.live.com is responsible 48%. But, Alexa is not realistic data. IMHO, the trend of Bloggers using Alexa as real authority needs to stop.
Good point, JD Amer.
I just blogged something along these lines:
http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2006/03/zdnet-reviews-ajax-desktops.html
[...] I was wondering if Live.com may have a lot of traffic (very easy to achieve for Microsoft) but few real users who actually bookmark the site and come back? [...] Maybe Del.icio.us bookmarks are a better proxy to guesstimate another site's user base than Alexa after all?
Yes it was a great point by J.D. and he pointed me to the Alexa page:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=live.com
Where do people go on live.com? (what's this)
* mail.live.com - 48%
* ideas.live.com - 21%
* live.com - 10%
* local.live.com - 10%
* safety.live.com - 5%
* help.live.com - 2%
* favorites.live.com - 1%
* domains.live.com - 1%
* fremont.live.com - 1%
* Other websites - 1%
Personally, I don't like the name AJAX homepages; it focuses too much on the technology being used than the concept of personalization.
If interesting, I wrote a review about the four biggest services in http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/01/19/a-war-of-personalization/