Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Another Cool Personalized "Desktop"

A few days ago I did a post about Netvibes which is a slick Web 2.0 welcome screen that you can customize with your favorite feeds, gmail etc...

Recently someone suggested I take a look at Pageflakes. At first glance it looks very similar to Netvibes with much the same functionality. The one thing that really popped out at me though were the tabs at the top of the screen that allow you to setup different views and/or categorize your "flakes." These are a great feature and might just be enough to make me switch from Netvibes.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm debating jumping from Netvibes too. I first saw the tabbed browsing as a reason to jump but on second thought the whole purpose of the AJAX desktop is to consolidate what you find important onto one page. The tabbed browsing while a good quality may add to information fatigue.

So I might stick with Netvibes. Plus you can't import your RSS feeds into pageflakes yet. Might wait until they have some more functionality.

Anonymous said...

HomePortals by cfEmpire...
http://www.cfempire.com/

Anonymous said...

I wondering where the ROI is. How are these companies making any money? Unless they are going to sell user habits based on input into the app, how will they stay afloat? I seriously think a bunch of these 2.0 apps are going to take a dump in the next year or so unless they start figuring out how make money.

tt said...

I tend to agree with brandon. Someone needs to develop a strong business model for these types of apps. They are incredibly usefull but if they aren't making money most of them won't last for long.

An obvious solution for something like Netvibes or Pageflakes is to have advertising pods on your welcome screen or vendor sponsored pods. Another option would be to have pods that offer certain services for a fee (ie. event reminders sent to your cell phone or partnerships with online retailers).