We've seen a lot of action in the 'personalized start page' space on the consumer side, but relatively little development in business web 'start pages'. Salesforce.com has an interesting feature in its upcoming Winter '07 release that may change that. Called the Business Web Desktop, it's basically an Ajax-powered web homepage for Salesforce apps.
The applications accessible on Business Web Desktop will include: activities, opportunities, leads, campaigns, other objects (including custom objects). The idea of this "customized desktop" is to provide all the information business people need on a single screen. The user interface relies heavily on a dynamic Ajax interface. Other features include multiple panes, data refresh in each pane occurring when data changes, and dynamic lists that expand as the user mouses over them.
Because this is for enterprise, there is a certain amount of control maintained by the IT dept. Admins will configure the page layouts and mini page layouts and assign users to profiles and record types. Users can however set up their own list views.
There has been some discussion on whether this Business Web Desktop will replace the salesforce.com "home tab" in the service. That won't happen in the Winter '07 release, but possibly in future:
"In the Winter release, we will be adding the Console as a separate Tab, it will not replace the Home tab, but that has been discussed."
We've written before about 'personalized start pages' being a great option for company dashboards or even intranet homepages. So good to see this is turning into reality, care of Salesforce.com. Winter '07 is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter. Here are some initial screenshots - a bit blurry, but they are the only ones currently available...
See also: Salesforce.com previews Analytics and Dashboard Mash-Ups
Man about town Om Malik bumped into Netvibes CEO Tariq Krim at the The Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco. Tariq told Om that Netvibes now has 5 million users, so naturally he is very optimistic of its future. Currently on Read/WriteWeb we're running a poll asking whether independent Personalized Start Pages (such as Netvibes, Pageflakes and Webwag) have a viable future as profitable businesses. The results so far have just 51% of respondents saying yes, start pages do have a future. 47% think no, they will go the way of the dot coms. 2% admitted they don't know what start pages are. The poll is still open, so have your say here:
I liked Om's conclusion, which I heartily agree with - not just for Netvibes but Pageflakes and the other small start pages too. Om said:
"...when I see Netvibes, I see a company that is offloading a bulk of heavy lifting to the client, aka the browser. Not very different than Skype, you could say. I see a tool that if nurtured properly could become the gatekeeper to my attention. Just like MySpace has the attention of its 100 million plus users, Netvibes can do the same, but as a starting point for our digital journeys. Of course, the company has to keep innovating and coming up with ways to extend their ecosystem. And they need to maintain unwavering focus on making the service easier, faster and more convenient to use."
Despite Netvibe's 5M user base (is that return users?), we're still a way off start pages being mainstream tools. Yahoo has shown little interest in doing one - which indicates they're still of niche value. And I've determined they're no good as RSS Readers (both Netvibes and Pageflakes ate up too much of my PC's memory every time they loaded up all my RSS feeds). But as a home to mini web apps and widgets, which will become increasingly popular, start pages have a promising future.
Recently a new personalized start page product was announced, Webwag. In the comments to my post about Webwag, several people expressed their view that start pages are not a viable business. Personally I think start pages have plenty of opportunities to make money, despite (and sometimes because of) competition from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.
The first point to make is that - unlike the big Internet companies - start pages like Netvibes, Pageflakes and Webwag are independent. This means they can act as a platform for a wider range of businesses than the big Internet companies - whose main purpose is to be a platform for their own portal products.
In practical terms, what this means is that the small start pages can make partnerships with other small businesses and startups. A recent example of this is Pageflakes teaming up with Zixxo to offer local coupons. As the Pageflakes blog put it:
"...businesses can create and manage their coupons with Zixxo and they syndicate them out to local consumers through partner websites. All Pageflakes users can now add the Zixxo Flake to their personal page and search for local coupons, specials and discounts."
Pageflakes has also recently buddied up with Odeo Podcasts, Rapleaf Reputations, Correios Package Tracking and others.
Netvibes also has a raft of partner modules - including for eBay, Digg, Meebo and Alexa.
So we're seeing a number of these 'partnerships' happening in the start page space and it'll only increase over time. While there's nothing stopping the big companies (Google, MS, Y!) doing the same, in reality their major priority is to promote their own proprietary product range. For example, why would Google Personalized Page promote Zixxo's coupons when they have their own Google Local coupons?
Pageflakes homepage
If you consider the trend towards a world of widgets and gadgets (mini web applications), you begin to see the potential to make real money from an independent platform. As I wrote in a June article entitled The Future of Personalized Start Pages, the likes of Pageflakes and Netvibes "are building up to a near future where gadgets/widgets will be much more plentiful and functional. Basically these start pages are expecting the world of web services to blossom in the next few years, which is my expectation too."
The big Internet companies stand to gain a lot from this too - e.g. in my recent interview with GM Windows Live George Moore, he said that Windows Live is being built on their gadget architecture. Microsoft expects to see gadgets being used across many different devices. Moore said:
"The gadget architecture can actually render to any number of different technologies. It can render to DHTML, to Avalon, etc. So it would be up to the gadget author to detect if they're running on a Vista machine, if they choose."
So widgets/gadgets are ramping up to be a key part of the Web platform going forward, which all the start pages (big and small) are ideally placed to leverage. And the smaller start pages have certainly not shied away from building up their platforms. Pageflakes now has 100 "flakes" (i.e. widgets) and recently introduced more customization options. Likewise, Netvibes is putting in a lot of work on their module ecosystem.
Netvibes Ecosystem
Another option for small start pages is to white label their technology - i.e. offer it to other organizations as a customizable start page. I can see a lot of potential demand from corporates and media companies to use a start page, with their own branding, so that employees and/or customers may create their own 'portal' experience. Similar to what Reddit is doing in the social news space.
Webwag CEO Franck Poisson said that affiliate marketing is a key aspect of their start page, a la what Netvibes is doing with Kelkoo. And as e-consultancy recently wrote, there is potential for start pages to move into 'social shopping'. This could mean building on the partnerships mentioned above and ensuring that start pages get a cut of whatever is sold via a merchant's widget on their page.
New start page, Webwag
This is one of the more interesting areas for small start pages to explore, particularly given the relative weakness of the big Internet companies outside of the US and english-speaking countries. It's interesting to note that the small start pages I've mentioned in this post are all based in Europe - Pageflakes in Germany, Netvibes in France and Webwag in France too.
Netvibes is in the process of making their service much more international:
"At netvibes, we are actively working to make our service available to everyone in every language. In fact, we have already built a collaborative tool for the translation of any content on netvibes. The service, now in beta, enabled us to successfully translate the site into Spanish and Japanese."
Similarly, Pageflakes has recently localized to China, Brazil and Germany.
So catering to the international markets is a key way that the small start pages can do business - because as I've discovered while doing my series on international web apps, localization matters and it's something the big Internet companies aren't necessarily good at.
Pageflakes CEO Christoph Janz told me that "personalized startpages like Pageflakes have a business model that is similar to 'old school' portals: build a large customer base and monetize it via advertising, e-commerce commissions and lead generation." And Christoph believes the independence of small start pages will enable them to "connect thousands of providers with millions of consumers of digital content, services and applications."
Which is to say: there are opportunities aplenty for smart start pages and I think the early entrants Netvibes and Pageflakes are particularly well-placed to take advantage of them. I'll be interested to see what Webwag brings to the table, plus it wouldn't surprise me to see more entrants to this market (e.g. it's not a stretch for the likes of Suprglu or 43Things to consider doing a start page).
Of course the big 3 will likely take a huge chunk of the start pages market, but in my view there are more than enough opportunities for the smaller players.
Webwag is a new personalized start page set to be released at the end of this month. According to E-consultancy.com, it's the latest creation of ex-Google France chief Franck Poisson - who says it "will move out of beta on August 28" and be officially announced in early September. More from E-Consultancy.com:
"According to Poisson, Webwag will shortly launch a toolbar, allowing users to import bookmarks and other sites into widgets on their home page, as well as to search their chosen sites or the web as a whole. For the latter, it has inked a partnership with a “big search company”, which Poisson won’t name."
What's more, Poisson is talking up the chances of the independent start pages - such as Pageflakes, Netvibes and now Webwag. He thinks the big companies - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - won't capture more than 50% of the market:
"According to Poisson, Webwag’s revenue streams will include affiliate marketing – something Netvibes is doing via Kelkoo - and B2B deals, an as yet unexplored area. Chris previously suggested that white labelling this technology is one key revenue opportunity for these firms to consider.
Poisson said: "As Web 2.0 develops over the next three three to five years, two things will remain. Firstly, everyone will have their own blog, and over 75% of people will have their own personalised start pages.
"My belief is the big search portals (My Yahoo etc) will get 50% of that market, and 50% will be taken by three to four independents.”"
Personally I think that 50% figure for independents is too ambitious. I also question his claim that 75% of people will have a start page in 3-5 years, unless you count the likes of Yahoo.com as a 'personalized start page' (actually I suspect the distinction will be moot in 5 years time).
In any case I do believe there is very viable market for the 'independents' - particularly in white labelling and B2B deals. Personalized start pages are one of the more inventive areas of Web technology at the moment, with action aplenty from Internet giants and small startups alike. It'll be interesting to see what Webwag has to offer - currently the link above is password-protected.
I was pleasantly surprised that my post The Future of Personalized Start Pages get Dugg last week. Looking through the comments, most of the Digg readers liked Netvibes or Google's start page. btw Google is still promoting its start page on the google.com page, which I think is significant (not many other people do though, judging by the lack of Techmeme action on that subject).
On business models for start pages, the Postbubble blog floated the concept of "consolidation" as a means to rise above the standard advertising-supported model:
"An example of this would be to consolidate industry-specific news, market data, competitive intelligence, email, and even collaboration tools in such a way that it would appeal to companies interested as a corporate start page. You could even make it specific to the sales group, marketing group, or R&D.")
A business portal was one of the things I mentioned in my post as an option for start pages, so I like Postbubble's thinking there.
Google is for the first time promoting its Personalized Homepage on the google.com homepage, using football World Cup modules/widgets. There is a "New! Add World Cup live scores and schedules to this page" promo link directly under the search query box, which leads to a "Welcome to Your Google homepage. Make it your own" start page.
This is great to see and shows (once again) that Google is tackling Microsoft head-on in key market segments. Indeed earlier this evening Microsoft announced an upgrade to its personalized homepage, live.com (it will be released next week, but I have preview screenshots on my ZDNet blog). Also of course, the little startups are doing a lot in this market currently (Netvibes, Pageflakes, et al). See my post earlier this week - The Future of Personalized Start Pages - for my analysis on this.
Screenshots of the google.com promotion and World Cup modules below. Game on!
p.s. I can't wait for the World Cup to start! I'm a big fan of Brazil, they epitomize the Beautiful Game.
Personalized Start Pages is a growing, but fiercely competitive, market. So what are they? Predominantly they're homepages for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The difference from old-style web portals are: the user can personalize them much more (with RSS, inline email, etc), the content is more interactive and potentially much more useful (i.e. gadgets, widgets), they can be collaborative, and there is Ajax pixie dust to make it more of a desktop-like experience.
As I've blogged about before, the market has a lot of contenders. They fall into two main groups - The Big Guns (Microsoft's live.com, Google Personalized Homepage, My Yahoo) and The Little Companies (Netvibes, Protopage, PageFlakes, etc). Now, as Mike Arrington noted, the big list of little companies is potentially starting to thin out:
"Well, the inevitable is starting to happen - a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back. Fold.com, an Ajax home page, has folded."
Looking at the Alexa charts, it clearly shows Fold.com (the blue line hugging the horizontal axis) never really got off the ground:
The chart also shows how successful Netvibes has been. This is also obvious from the Netvibes blog, which is chock full of new feature announcements and lots of comments from passionate users.
Pageflakes and Protopage are another couple of contenders which are hanging in there, to use Mike's apt phrase. So what's the business model of these start pages, when all the big guns have their own start pages? Microsoft and Google are seemingly putting a lot of stock into gadgets/widgets. Meanwhile Yahoo is happy enough (for now) to continue to serve the mainstream audience - for which widgets are still a fair way off being user-friendly.
I think there are still a lot of opportunities for the small companies. For example I took a look at Pageflakes' press kit and I was struck by this slide in particular:
It's a little hard to see due to the width limitations of my site, but here's a full-length version. My point here is that Pageflakes, and I'm sure Netvibes and the others too, are building up to a near future where gadgets/widgets will be much more plentiful and functional. Basically these start pages are expecting the world of web services to blossom in the next few years, which is my expectation too.
One key for the little companies is to persuade external developers to create gadgets/widgets for their platforms. Pageflakes is an open platform, so I think it's got a great chance at succeeding in this strategy - as long as they can sell themselves to that developer ecosystem. It currently claims 50% of their 'flakes' (i.e. gadgets) are created by "Community Developers" and they say this figure is rising. Netvibes is similarly well positioned - arguably better, because it has managed to get such a great user/developer uptake so quickly.
In terms of growing the user base, I thought Peter Cooper made an excellent comment on Techcrunch. After noting that Yahoo will likely keep hold of the mainstream crowd, Peter said:
"If anything’s going to really break through, it’s going to be Google’s (because of their sheer might), or something that appeals to the MySpace/LiveJournal crowd (because of the sheer numbers and the way memes spread on there). I dare say that MySpace could pull it off if they tried."
(emphasis mine)
Peter's right, the MySpace crowd will be highly attractive to start page companies. It's something which may potentially break this market wide open.
The other business model the likes of Netvibes and Pageflakes will pursue is the enterprise market - and maybe even white-labelling. For example I happen to know that one of the small companies mentioned above is exploring options as a 'business portal'. If start pages can integrate office apps like Writely and JotSpot into their pages (which is already happening) and promote that to enterprises - that's potentially a profitable market.
So while it's sad to see companies like Fold.com slip away, I don't think this is any reflection on the market itself for personalized start pages. In fact, I think it's full of opportunities - many of which may not clash with the plans of The Big Guns. And that's why Netvibes and Pageflakes have gotten funding. There is a future in their Personalized Start Pages, as long as they execute well.
Stowe Boyd and Mike Arrington reported today that AOL’s new social networking product AIM Pages is now live. I'm told by my sources that it's still in the testing phase, nevertheless it *is* live on the Web. There is a lot more functionality to come though. For example PaidContent wrote recently:
"Unlike walled-garden Classic AOL, AIM Pages is built on giving users ways to collect and connect to various parts of the web — and each other — from one base. For instance, users can add a flickr module. “Our approach is not to get you to leave flickr but to super-set your stuff from flickr,” explained Parkins. Other modules focus on AOL content, like the Top 11 list from AOL Music; options will be limited at first with more modules being introduced on a rolling basis."
As Mike said, the design is very modular - and that extends not only to internal AIM Pages functionality, but also to external web services modules. From the AIM Pages homepage, click on 'Create your profle'. You will be taken to your profile page, click 'Add Modules' and then you will see a 'Module Gallery' at the top-left. The most interesting part in that gallery is the 'Under Construction' selection. It currently features modules like delicious, netflix and youtube - but there's a whole lot more to come!
Check out AOL's test 'playground' I Am Alpha to see what I mean. In there you'll see modules for popular web services such as: MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, Amazon, eBay, MapQuest, Netflix, AOL apps, RSS feeds, plus plenty of other test modules. Now admittedly these are all very alpha quality modules (as the name implies), but it shows that AOL is ahead of the curve in integrating external services into its social networking offering. Note that I'm somewhat biased here, as Broadband Mechanics (who I do work for) was contracted by AOL to build the following external modules: NetFlix, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Network for Good and Delicious. But still, I think you'll agree that AOL's willingness to hook into external web services is a very encouraging (and forward-thinking) break from the past for them. Tearing down those 90's Walled Gardens!
p.s. note that despite all the 'MySpace killer' theories out there, AIM Pages actually works *with* MySpace - in terms of having a module for it (in testing on I Am Alpha).
To try it out go to the I Am Alpha frontpage and click the 'playground!!' tab. You need to log in using your AOL id in order to play around - and this is the kind of page you can then create:
Below is a closer look at one of the modules, the Amazon one. As you can see, it shows your Wish List and you can click the tab to see your Amazon reviews.
You can then publish your page into a pretty basic-looking 'homepage', which is a test for AIM Pages. This is all very alpha right now and indeed what you see currently on AIM Pages is just a slice of the real goodies. But given more development and the inevitable marketing push, I think this will be a compelling product. It's a taste of what Internet portal homepages will be like in the future. As well as having social networking functionality, portals will integrate modules for popular web services and be able to communicate (and eventually transact) with those external services.
Pageflakes, one of the little startups in the
'personalized start page' market, has come out with a page publishing feature that
nicely connects with my post the other day: Web 2.0 market segment
mashups. In that post I noted that we're seeing a lot of market segment cross-over
nowadays, in terms of functionality and feature sets. I also made the point that
'personalized start pages' (such as Pageflakes) are designed to be a user's private homepage on
the Web for their content subscriptions and web apps. But at the time I thought they
didn't have much in common with the 'Microcontent Aggregators' I'd been reviewing (such
as Peoplefeeds and Suprglu), which are more focused on aggregating and publishing a
user's personal content onto one page.
However this new feature by Pageflakes puts those definitions to the test, because it enables you to publish your Pageflakes homepage so that others may view it - perhaps just friends, or even make it totally public. As explained by Ole Brandenburg:
"It's a good way to quickly setup a readonly site of yours on the web. Put notes, todo list, some feeds, a clock on your public page and you have a nice site of yours!"
So in a way, this publishing feature intersects with the content management functionality of the likes of Peoplefeeds and Suprglu. Or as Ian Kennedy from Yahoo! put it so well, in a comment on my market segment mashups post:
"The line between what you read and what you (re)publish is, as you point out, becoming blurred. This is a complex design problem but everyone's thinking about it so we should see some interesting solutions in the next couple of months."
Currently I think this feature by Pageflakes is 'read only' [update - correction, shared pages can in fact be edited] - but what if they went
even further and enabled other people to (re)write the site (subject to some security or
approval mechanism perhaps by the start page owner). That would add another layer onto
web services. Because if you publish your personal homepage so that others may read/write
it too, well then essentially you're creating a new web service. Or does that get too
confusing? :-)
At any rate, Pageflakes has around 70 widgets now (they call them flakes) and is one of the best start pages on the market currently. Both Pageflakes and Netvibes are doing some unique things and pushing the boundaries. I get the feeling there is room for more than a few 'little guys' in a market which also features Microsoft (live.com), Google, AOL and Yahoo widgets.
AOL has just released a new site called
I Am Alpha, which is their version of Yahoo! Widgets or Microsoft Gadgets. Google has modules and all the smaller players have
similar widget featuresets - PageFlakes calls
them "flakes" and Goowy calls them minis. All of these things are
basically little web apps that can be integrated into your desktop or a webpage (e.g. a
personalized homepage such as live.com or PageFlakes). Here's how AOL defines its
modules:
"A module is a "distinct piece of content or functionality." That's a fancy way of saying it's a very small web page that can be embedded easily in another web page."
Screenshot from the intro video
As SiliconBeat noted, this is "another departure from AOL's infamous "walled garden'' days." Although I would add out that none of these widget or module platforms is yet interoperable. Especially not the big companies, although of the smaller players PageFlakes and Netvibes seem very keen on developing an open API platform.
I am Alpha is focused on the AIM product right now, although I imagine this will extend out to AOL's portal products in due course:
"I Am Alpha is a site for developers and other curious folks to play around with the underlying technology behind a whole new crop of cool AIM products."
I have to say this announcement by AOL looks promising. They're talking of developing a microformat called AOL ModuleT: A Module Transport Microformat Profile. The documentation for the modules is well done too and all in all it's a promising addition to the Web's growing widget ecosystem.
