Pageflakes v2.0

Looks pretty impressive. I have been using the Ajax based start pages for quite sometime and for the last few months, I have been hooked on to Netvibes. I actually tried Pageflakes first and then switched and this is what I wrote sometime back. At that time the pageflakes site didn’t look impressive at all and I felt that the background colour was really pathetic. That is the first thing that has to be nice about a website. If the background is disappointing then half the audience is lost. Anyway, after that I didn’t venture to find out what was happening in that site after that.

Yesterday, I was just curious to find out what was happening to the Pageflakes site and it said ‘Upgrade in Progress’. And today when I visited the site again, I was quite thrilled about it. First and foremost, the interface looks awesome. When you first visit the site it starts with asking you about creating an account and then asks for the colour and the default colour itself looks impressive. With my poor sense of colour I haven’t been able to identify the exact colour, but it looks blueish. That is a major lift for this site as blue offers a very pleasant feel to the page.

Pageflakes is seemingly moving in a different direction from Netvibes. Maybe they are trying to shift the area of competition from individual users to communities. Pageflakes offers the functionality of Page Sharing. What this means is that a single page on pageflakes can be kept private, can be shared among a few users or can be made public. This points to the direction of community building. What this means is that you can create a page and invite your family and friends to view it and the only thing required from them is to view the page. This sort of a feature can get those non-geeks to start using the system. So far, I am pretty sure that most of the audience for the start pages has been from nerd audience and this audience can be at best termed as the early majority. Or to say on the lines of the Long Tail, the Long Tail of the start page market is yet to be tapped.

With the page sharing functionality Pageflakes has got a Social Networking feel to it. Compared to Netvibes, which focusses on individual users, Pageflakes seems to be moving in the opposite direction. And since they are not going head to head for the same audience, this can help them maintain their early mover advantage. Also, this might be a sign that these start pages are beginning to think and act in a more mature way.

The other feature which pageflakes offers and I just love is the RSS reader feature. It is so convenient to browse all the feeds. It gives me the feel of using Attensa on Outlook and also minimizes movement across the widgets to browse different feeds.

Some shortcomings:
1. It still doesn’t maintain the structure from an imported OPML. I reported about this problem long time back. This isn’t too big an issue, but would help if it is handled properly.
2. It would be nice to have a ‘My Feeds’ column. I was searching for my feeds once I imported them using the opml.
3. A picture as a background would be really nice.

This is the Alexa ranking of Pageflakes and Netvibes. Though there are a number of shortcomings in using this ranking, it provides this data for free. So, I thought lemme just use it.

The reach of Netvibes seems to be much higher compared to pageflakes and this is something that pageflakes has to try and address. I am not a big fan of Pageviews and with the advent of AJAX and widgets based stuff on the web, it has become even more irrelevant.

Technorati Tags: Pageflakes, pageflakes 2.0, start pages

Netvibes contd.. (Some suggestions)

I have been using Netvibes for the last few weeks and this was my initial post about Netvibes. Based on the experience of the last few weeks, I have a few suggestions for the Netvibes team.
1. Have a Pin-Up facility for a feed. (By Pin-Up I am referring to a sticky facility. Basically, if I should be able to lock the position of a feed to a place on the screen.)
2. Ability to highlight only the feeds that have new entries after a refresh/reload. Along with this the facility to expand only those feeds which have new entries would be really helpful. (This can be another option next to “Expand all”.)
3. Have a newspaper style browser similar to what pageflakes has.
4. Provide a Save facility for the Webnotes. There can be a “Save to Desktop” or “Save by Logging on” facility added. This would be helpful in accessing the notes across computers.
5. Provision for storing the structure of the pages in the OPML file. (If this is against the OPML standard then call Netvibes Markup Language or by some other name and provide this facility as an option.) This facility can be useful if I want to use the same structure which I am logged in and when I am not logged in. The other important thing about this facility would be to provide an OPML which other sites can also use without any problems.
6. If possible a provision to display all the new feeds from the time the last feed was read. This might be difficult due to space constraints.
7. Please, please a faster load time. It takes at least 15-20 secs to load on a broadband connection. (Speed > 512Kbps). Please do something about this.

Ok, Something about their Business: ” Netvibes is a start up company created in 2005 basedin Paris and specialized in Web 2.0 applications. We are open to allbusiness opportunities, please contact us at : business@netvibes.com” This is from the About page of Netvibes. Are they trying to make themselves available to acquisitions?

Technorati Tags Web2.0,Netvibes

Netvibes

Thanks to Techcrunch, I came across Netvibes a couple of months back. It was listed as one of the “Start Pages” based on Ajax. If you don’t know what is Ajax or what is Web 2.0 then try Googling for them. Check this page for a listing of the Ajax based websites.

Earlier, I was using the web based RSS reader from Bloglines. It offered me the functionality of storing all my RSS feeds online which helped to a great deal, as I needn’t worry if I have to move across systems. The problem with the web-based RSS reader was that I have to login everytime I have to check the feeds. Also, I found them to be slow and difficult to configure and these also posed lot of navigational problems. I used Bloglines for quite sometime before I decided to move to these start pages. I had tried Google’s Personalize and for some inexplicable reason didn’t like it. Maybe it was too early or I just didn’t know how to use it effectively. Then I came across some more Start pages and two of those which I tried were Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Netvibes and Pageflakes offered similar functionality. Both were configurable, offered good feeds to start with. Initially I tried Pageflakes as it had won the SEOmoz’s Web2.0 awards. The initial setup was easy and I played around with the settings for a few days before I decided to move all my RSS feeds from Bloglines to Pageflakes. Till now, I had liked the site a lot but he troubles began when I tried to import my OPML file which I had exported from Bloglines. It just didn’t maintain the categorization that I had done in Bloglines. This is not something really important, but something like this would help in reducing the setup time. Maybe the file exported from Bloglines had some problem, but that I won’t find out unless I move back to Pageflakes in the near future. Anyway, I could have tried arranging my RSS feeds into their respective categories one more time, but at that time I decided to give Netvibes a try.

The first screen on Netvibes (for some reason) caught my eye. It was actually quite slow to load compared to Pageflakes, but I liked the screen. Maybe the blue background appeared very nice or the widgets that were shown were good (I would love to see Pageflakes with a blue background or some background similar to Netvibes. The pageflakes background doesn’t look too appealing) . For a reason unknown, I loved the page. I then played around with it for about an hour and then decided to import my OPML file. This time the file got imported properly and I was able to arrange my feeds properly. I managed to setup whatever I wanted in the required pages. Adding a feed was no problem, but I had a lot of trouble if I had to move feeds across pages or move a feed from “My feeds” to one of the categories that I had. The menu in those places is not very intuitive. I had to search as to how I have to do these things. It also offered Sudoku as a part of its ecosystem. I have shared a couple of my pages. I shared the pages of Blogs and Business from my Netvibes site.

Then I exported all the feeds from the Netvibes site to a OPML. All this while, I was doing the setup while I had logged in. Though Netvibes (and Pageflakes) doesn’t insist that you login it is better that the first time the settings are being done you login and do them. This offers you the advantage that a web-based RSS reader would offer. Once I have saved my settings under my login, I exported the OPML from netvibes and then imported it on my system without a login. So, whenever I go to netvibes.com, I get my own page. However, this doesn’t maintain any page setups that you might have done under your login. So, you have to again setup pages though the categories are maintained properly. Another problem with Netvibes is that it doesn’t seem to have a setup for the system. I haven’t ventured to find out how they are exactly storing the information, but it seems that if I use a different browser, I have to do the setup again.

My Netvibes page on my system (without logging in)

After logging in

The problem I was talking about earlier was that the OPML imported did not give me the structure in which I had saved the page. This might be a restriction as the OPML format might not allow them to do so. Maybe, they can move to a netvibes format in which this information can also be sent. So, there can be another menu option which gives the user the option of either just exporting the OPML (for use with other readers) or exporting with all netvibes settings.

With the advent of these kinds of start pages, and with the news aggregation facilities offered by these sites, Google News might start facing a new kind of threat. Even though I love Netvibes, Pageflakes offers a little more functionality and stability. It lods much quicker and also hasn’t thrown any error at me while loading so far.Some day I would like to try Pageflakes again, but for now it is going to be Netvibes.