Here is a classic, Web 2.0 conundrum: which of the three most popular start pages should you invest significant time, energy and effort within?
Besides the usual Google, Yahoo, AOL and others, there are — in my opinion the top choices — the new Web 2.0-ish ones like yourminis, Netvibes and Pageflakes. Directionally, these three are embracing the drag-n-drop, turn-a-module-into-a-widget for publishing anywhere on the Web and artfully allowing each of us to build our own ‘dashboard’ to aggregate and access all of our favorite Web stuff.
The kicker is that each one of them, regardless of how easy they are to use, require a fair amount of time to mold, shape, customize and play with in order to get ‘em just right. I like what each of them are delivering A LOT and find the promise of an aggregated start page compelling.
What is even MORE compelling is the direction each is taking through the enabling tools and methods they’re giving us to mashup or remix the Web. Pete Cashmore says it best in this post:
Widget Disruption – Two pieces of news make me think that the widget world is headed for major disruption in the coming weeks. First up, Netvibes plans to catch up with PageflakesYourMinis by making its widgets available to post on MySpace, hi5, Piczo, blogs and other sites. Netvibes is also set to launch a Universal Widget API, allowing widgets to share data back and forth and synchronize among themselves. Look out for the hotly-anticipated Netvibes social network to launch in April.
I still shudder to think about latency when pages have dozens of widgets on them and we all sit around drumming our fingers on our desks waiting for it to parse and load…but I’m loving the ability to assemble pieces-n-parts of my stuff on the Web into a new whole.
Are these start pages scalable and worth our effort? Are they similar to what big companies deliver inside their organizations? Pete’s one sentence about Netvibes is an interesting one to consider when thinking about start pages and which one to pick “…allowing widgets to share data back and forth and synchronize among themselves.”
Steve’s Social Stuff