Update on Personalized Start Pages
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.
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Richard,
You tossed the idea of an enterprise-geared start page into your post on the Future of Start pages and I couldn’t agree more that there is a future as long as they execute properly. We tried to throw some concrete ideas and detail about the business models that could succeed under the shadow of the big guys. Thanks for the mention.
Posted by: Aneil Weber | June 11, 2006 10:36 PM
Hi Richard,
I signed up for PageFlakes after reading your previous post. Within about 30 seconds, I was able to create a page with
(a) Photos from my Flickr account
(b) Local weather and map
(c) A mortgage calculator
My neighbor, a realtor, has been talking for months about hiring someone to build him a website. These are pretty much the items he'd want to have.
PageFlakes does allow other people to access your start page through an URL that looks like http://www.pageflakes.com/yourname.ashx
But why not go a step farther, sell users domain names, and give them the ability to redirect http://www.yourname.com to their version of PageFlakes?
You and the PostBubble folks both see personal start pages evolving into corporate start pages. But in addition to shared start pages among pre-formed groups, might there be room for someone to create a start page with consolidated industry-specific news, market data, competitive intelligence, etc and make it publicly available?
Posted by: Isabel Wang | June 12, 2006 3:41 PM