Start page 2.0 ?
Posted on 06.11.05 at 00:49 CET
I thought we’d witnessed the death of the whole custom start page thing after the first bubble burst (am I subconsciously expecting another? <Scottish innkeeper from Little Britain voice>Yessssss...</voice>, but I digress...), however they’ve been resurrected with a vengeance. They aggregate external content now instead of following the old walled garden model of their predecessors and they’ve been spiced up with flash or all kinds of ajaxy eye-candy goodness, but the principle remains the same: a single start page condensing everything you read or need into a bite-sized chunk of html.
I’ve tried or at least checked out a lot of them: Google IG, Netvibes, protopage, suprglu, goowy, even My Yahoo and most recently Microsoft’s very own Windows Live which, not surprisingly, didn’t work too well on a mac. None of them got past the novelty barrier for me. There’s a lot of information out there and I like absorbing it through separate channels instead of a giant scrapbook. NetNewswire for RSS feeds and opening everything else in multiple browser tabs gives me a better experience.
Now, granted, I probably ingest more online information daily than many people and maybe I’m just turning into a grumpy old bastard (probable...) but the whole idea of a start page seems as bad now as it did back in the days of My Excite or whatever it was called. So my question is: do any of you use these services on a regular basis? And if you do, what do you like about them? If you don’t, how do you sort through all that daily noise? Are these start pages a passing fad or a useful online tool that liberates you from the desktop?
As I type, another one is getting ready to join the flock: Zoozio. It’s getting crowded in that space, what am I missing?
10 comments
I don’t get them either. My home page is blank but I have a keyboard shortcut to a Google search. My parents insist on having Google because that’s what they want most often when they open a browser. So they don’t work as homepages.
That said, I open bloglines.com quite a lot to read my feeds and if that looked nicer and had other non-RSS content I could personalise then ... maybe?
Mostly I’m as nonplussed as you.
Bah, just go to FreshArrival everyday instead :)
i like google.com/ig
I try loads of these services and after a few days or weeks, I forget about them. I imagine that means they’re no help for me :)
Kmd, why do you like Google/ig?
because it’s easy to use and i like the simple layout. haven’t been looking around for any other startpage, in fact google/ig is the first startpage i’ve ever used.
Richard, that’s comment spam, but I’ll be nice and leave it :)
Google’s start page always seemed too general for me and all that single sign-on to gmail, talk, news and whatnot is starting to scare me a bit as far as what I read and say being monitored.
I’m probably too impatient, but I can’t stand waiting for a start page to load from the net, so it’s a blank one for me.
google/ig is pretty general. i only add sites i read very often (like this one:). for example, i added reuters, bbc, standaard, some blogs, bxlnieuws, some tech sites and that’s it. for other rss feeds i use the firefox live bookmarks.
I use My Yahoo! on a daily basis and I quite like it. I read stuff on it that I wouldn’t normally seek out when a headline catches my eye. Since I’m into an eclectic mix of stuff, there isn’t anywhere else on the web that would be a one stop shop for a morning coffee read.
Incidentally, your link to Windows Live is a repeat of the link to My Yahoo!
Oops. Fixed the link, thanks.
I don’t get these start pages, even my mother has stopped using MSN as her start page and now it’s Google. They look much cooler than the old one though :-)