Disclosure: Pageflakes is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb.
It's the season of v2.0 launches! The
personalized start page Pageflakes has undergone
a major upgrade to its interface, which has just gone live today. Back in May I posted about
Pageflakes' page publishing feature, which enables users to share their pages
with other people - as read-only or editable. This type of community functionality has been extended in
the new version of Pageflakes. On the homepage it states:
"You can have multiple pages. For each of them you can choose to keep it private, share it with friends or publish it on the Web."
The idea is to enable users to form groups and share widgets that way. This may drive user growth, as people get 'invited' into the system by their friends and family. That looks to be the plan anyway - and it'll be interesting to watch how it works out. There is still a sense that personalized start pages are too geeky for the average user, which Pageflakes (and its competition) will need to overcome.
The page sharing and publishing functionality differentiates Pageflakes from its competitors - and gives Pageflakes a social networking feel to it. Netvibes (probably its main competitor) appears to be focusing more on being a homepage for individual users - reflected in the Netvibes motto of "making your digital life better". Webwag, a recent entry to this space, has also established itself as a player via a strategic partnership with Yahoo.
What's interesting here is that the leading small players (i.e. not Google or Microsoft) are beginning to differentiate themselves - each has their own style and positioning now. Could this be a sign that the start pages space is maturing?
Nevertheless there's a bit of an 'arms race' going on between all the start pages regarding the number of widgets they have. Pageflakes has 120, while Netvibes has 391. Microsoft's Live.com has 442 at this date. But all are dwarfed by Google Personalized Page, which boasts 1531 gadgets (see my 10 favorite here). It may not be totally apples and oranges, in terms of what each vendor counts as a widget - e.g. some of Google's widgets are pretty much just RSS feeds. In any case, I think Pageflakes is wise to focus on building its community features rather than try and compete on number of widgets.
The Start Page space never ceases to interest me, as it's a hotbed of web innovation. The pace is hot too, as both Netvibes and Pageflakes have released "2.0" versions recently!
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Good write-up and a good catch about the socialnetworking "feel" at Pageflakes. It's subtle differences in delivery of presentation, but I agree that it's partly the "tone" of Pageflakes that sets them apart from others.
Posted by: soxiam | October 18, 2006 6:01 AM
Finally a relaunch that deserves that title. A massive step - love the new design and the new community area.
Posted by: Martin | October 18, 2006 8:33 AM
cool new look but thats all new i could notice as it started to froze in my browser. looks like the redesign and new javascripts need some testing.
Posted by: elvirs | October 18, 2006 8:47 AM
I don't like Pageflakes because their "affiliate" program pays people to spam blog comments and forums. They've also been known to send out unsolicited advertisement e-mails.
Posted by: GorillaSushi | October 18, 2006 9:34 AM
I've loved it, better UI, more readable than ever.
@GorillaSushi, I've never experienced that, I hope PageFlakes guys will clarify it here.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 18, 2006 1:16 PM
I may stand corrected. Myself and a few others were blogging about their naughty practices a while back but now their "affiliates" link directs back to their homepage. Bravo to them if they have indeed changed their ways.
Posted by: GorillaSushi | October 18, 2006 2:58 PM
I don't really want to re-open this issue. A few months ago some users where posting replies in the name of Pageflakes. We have most certainly never send out unsolicited advertisement e-mails. All we send out are emails when users setup a shared page (invitation emails send by users) and when we send our newsletter (about once/month). Our affiliate program also doesn't pay people to spam blogs, it simply pays a commission based on the very same conditions that millions of other affiliate programs do.
If there have been problems associated with this in the past, I apologize. However, it was never our intention (and never will be) to cause problems. I would appreciate if people focus on the present. If you like Pageflakes, feel free to use and recommend it. If you don't like Pageflakes, feel free to not use it.
Thanks
Ole
Posted by: Ole Brandenburg | October 18, 2006 8:59 PM
Hmm, PageFlakes v2 doesn't seem to work in Camino. Sup with that?
I emailed them about the problem w/ PageFlakes v1.0 not working and they said "we haven't tested much on Mac browsers". What?! It's Camino -- sister of Firefox! How hard is it to make it work? All the other netdesktops do... if PageFlakes won't make an effort to make sure their service works just about everywhere that support JavaScript, I'm not sure I want to use them as my "home away from home" when I don't know what kind of browser a foreign computer or kiosk might be running!
Posted by: Chris Messina | October 19, 2006 12:39 PM
I disagree with you guys. I really like pageflakes, because they have a lot of integration with other systems, and now the new version has a lot of themes and templates. I think there is space for all systems, and if you prefer other one decide b y your self. But I stay with pageflakes, since I use firefox and it works really well for me.
Posted by: Rafael Zina | October 22, 2006 4:28 PM
While pageflakes and netvibes have done a good job establishing the idea of the start page, we've taken it a step further and have developed a vertical application for stock analysis. Our site incorporates the usual RSS feed reader but also includes financial modeling, and the ability to post to your blog. It harnesses the collective intelligence of the market to help users make better investment decisions.
Posted by: mark | October 31, 2006 9:58 AM