I was bemoaning the other day how klutzy my MyYahoo homepage was. You have limited ability to move things around, adding feeds is cumbersome and you can’t readily add cool widgets. I was thinking about how great it would be if they or someone came out with an aggregator of widgets. It would be an open platform that would allow you to stick the zillions of cool widgets floating around onto one homepage. I did a few Google searches on Widget aggregators but got little.
I then read Walter Mossberg’s piece on Netvibes and Pageflakes on Friday which are close to this. While neither allows you to jam any random widget you come across, both give you significant leeway in adding a growing see of widgets contributed to both. I am embarrassed a bit by this since a) I knew that one of Danny Rimer’s (of Skype fame) latest deals was Netvibes and b) that about 20% of my readers use Netvibes to read my posts. That said, I was like a kid in a candy store on Friday (not my most productive day from a work perspective). I have weather widgets, theater widgets, a Skype widget, a Meebo/Jabber widget for IM, key feeds, various search engines and such. It is a true portal of my interests, communication media and consumed content.
Yahoo is supposedly coming out with a similar concept for MyYahoo. Come on guys…you are getting lapped in category after category. It is amazing how poorly they execute against such an amazing customer asset. Note to self…buy Yahoo stock when I begin to see some signs of innovation creeping back into the firm since the results will pop big-time. We will see how the new ad system fares…
In the interim, add some Vibe into your world!
Sorry, I still have Google’s custom homepage now, and it allows for third-party plug-ins. I think the Wikipedia search box is a nice touch–
You should check out Protopages (http://www.protopage.com/) as well if you liked Netvibes. I personally have found the Google homepage to be the best however, since it syncs the easiest with Google calendar/Gmail etc.
Check out the new embedded version of Kool IM.
http://www.koolim.com
I used My Yahoo for years, then tried to switch to Pageflakes and Netvibes. Although I like Netvibes the best, it’s not a start “home” (browser home) page because it takes a long time to load. That annoys me. And My Yahoo annoys me because it’s constantly messed up.
Maybe I’ll just use a local file of my bookmarks as a homepage. Enough of this Web 2.0 crap.