2-3 years ago, so-called "startpages" were all the rage - online dashboards where users could store links and quickly scan important news feeds. Startpages were also an evolving platform for "widgets," mini web apps inside of a web page. The big Internet companies had startpages: iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Microsoft's Live.com. Among the startups, Netvibes managed to establish a foothold. Other startup battlers included PageFlakes and Protopage.
In 2007-08 startpages were viewed as the second coming of portals and some even thought they might be the next social networks. Now of course many people use Facebook or Twitter as their place to "start" on the Web. So what will become of the startpage - does it have a future? Let us know in our poll whether you still use a startpage product. We have some initial survey results and further analysis below.
In late November, ReadWriteWeb asked the question, Can Netvibes pull off integration of real-time feeds into its existing dashboard product?. At the time, early testers were just gaining access to Wasabi beta. As of today the service will go live to the public concurrent with CEO Freddy Mini's presentation at the Le Web conference.
Google today made an announcement that could prove to be not only important to the evolution of OpenSocial and iGoogle, but also to the social networking sector itself. Google announced a new developer sandbox for iGoogle that includes support for their OpenSocial APIs. Essentially, Google is working toward turning their start page property into a social network, though they haven't overtly said so. Google's move makes this officially the start of a trend we're seeing in start pages to get more social, and an idea we've been pushing at RWW for the past year.
AJAX start page provider Pageflakes officially announced today that it has been acquired by LiveUniverse. The deal is a combination of cash and stock, but the size of the acquisition was not disclosed. LiveUniverse, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, owns a number of social networking and video destinations, most notably LiveVideo. Rumors of this deal surfaced earlier this week, and it was officially announced today.
Netvibes, the French startpage near the top of the startpage market, is launching a new service this morning called Netvibes Premium Universes. The service allows companies to offer Netvibes functionality (reading feeds, posting widgets) on their own website with their own branding and domain. It's essentially a Netvibes page in an iframe on your website.
It's a great idea in theory, but I don't know how many companies will go for it. At launch the flagship customers include spam-factory Tagged.com and "the toolbar and content division of digital media company MIVA Inc." - they sell ads, including those despicable double-underline link ads. Fortunately two leading French newspapers, Les Echos and Le Figaro are part of the launch - without them you'd have to wonder why the product couldn't be sold to any legitimate businesses.
In a cheeky move, Netvibes has released a Facebook widget. Both Netvibes and Facebook are leading Web platforms for widgets (i.e. mini web apps that can be plugged into web pages and sites). So Netvibes is neatly trying to entice Facebook users to use Netvibes instead of Facebook as their homepage. Here is an example of the Facebook widget that Netvibes has released:
Of course it only includes Facebook data, not data from third party widgets. To be really cheeky, Netvibes should find a way to include all your third party Facebook widgets ;-) However Netvibes has actually done very well, because the only thing missing seems to be Facebook's news feed - because Facebook does not currently allow outsider providers to access the News Feed. Given that Facebook is not very open (at least outwards), this is impressive. Also it should be mentioned that you still need to click through to facebook to go through your friend requests, group invites, etc.
Last week the personalized start page Pageflakes announced its latest version, nicknamed Blizzard. It introduces social networking functionality, themes, a slick Ajax UI, and more. What struck me about the new look was how much it reminded me of Facebook, or at least how much it wants to be like Facebook. The same can be said of Netvibes, Pageflakes' main competitor. I wondered: does this mean that Pageflakes and Netvibes are moving away from the 'start page' market (which has intense competition from MyYahoo, Microsoft's Live.com and iGoogle) and more into the social networking / widgets domain currently dominated by MySpace and Facebook? Josh Catone wrote about this trend at the end of May, in a post entitled Who Can Compete with Facebook?. He wrote:
I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes
responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and 'pages'
features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done.
Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just
emailed my way. And actually Dan is uniquely qualified to discuss this, as
before becoming CEO of Pageflakes in January this year he was head
of MyYahoo. Here is what he said:
"The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today's users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others."
What it comes down to is that Yahoo obviously has a huge store of content and Web properties it can utilize in its personalized homepage. Whereas Pageflakes is one of the 'little guys' (along with slightly bigger little guy Netvibes), so its strengths and opportunities will be in opening up its platform and encouraging use of content from all over the Web.
Hot on the heels of My.Netscape's
personalized homepage makeover, Yahoo has announced a new version of its own long-running
personalized homepage, My Yahoo. It will at first be a
private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is
to gather feedback from those early users and then make the My Yahoo! beta more broadly
available - with additional features - over the coming months.
Read/WriteWeb got a sneak peak at the beta and we have some screenshots, along with our initial impressions, below. There is also a screencast available (but for now it is high res and slow to load; I'll notify you when a better version is up).
My Yahoo! has been Yahoo's personalized offering to its consumers since 1996. In the preview, Yahoo told me that My Yahoo! is seen as their "narrowcast" option for users, while the yahoo.com frontpage is seen as the broadcast model. However I was also told that, over time, the two homepages will converge. Certainly, the first thing I noticed about the new beta My Yahoo was that it had some of the new features Yahoo introduced last year with its Ajax makeover of yahoo.com. And the look and feel is very similar between the two.
My Yahoo! is essentially a user's dashboard, or start page, for the web. So it shares a lot in common with Microsoft's Live.com, Google's Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Webwag, and many others. However up till now, My Yahoo has been a relatively static personalized homepage - mostly devoid of the widgets and gadgets that populate the likes of Netvibes and Live.com. Also the design was rather conservative, although to be fair probably much more usable than the other 'start pages'. Also, My Yahoo was an early adopter of RSS feeds (not full text though).
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.
