It looks like Redwood City-based Zoozio will be the next horse in the AJAX desktop race.
We already have Protopage, Netvibes (our favorite) and (flash-based) Goowy. Oh yeah, and Google. Wait, Microsoft too.
There’s not much info on the site yet. I hope these guys have some interesting features if they want into this already crowded market. Thanks Steven for the tip. Pete Cashmore saw this yesterday as well.
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the mention. We’re actually working on something a little different, and we hope we can show you soon.
Take care,
Danny
umm… and google?
Jason, wow, I can’t believe I left Google IG out. Fixed.
Wow – I actually beat TechCrunch for once! By the way, Mike, you might also want to check out Conversate.org, DabbleDB.com (not yet launched) and Plum.com (also notlaunched), if you haven’t already.
You really should try out conversate.org – I think it’s worth reviewing.
i like the drag’n'dropping but …
i’m wondering if this is enough to make portals like netvibes, zoozio or protopage distinguishable from portals during the boom times? i recall that a lot of search engines were about to make everything personalised. on yahoo, you could even change the colors of the ugly and crowded homepage. back then they forgot about the user, because actually not very many used those features, thus they silently killed or reduced a lot of them.
i guess users weren’t ready for IT, so maybe it will work out this time, 5 years later … with drag’n'dropping, and hm … an rss reader … hm … and weather info … hm and stock quotes… wait, that doesn’t sound very new.
goowy might be a bit different but …
i didn’t understand desktop replacements in 1999 when there was a heavy javascript “OnlineOS” (don’t remember the exact name, desktop.com?) and i still don’t understand them today. why would i use a desktop, no matter if it’s in ajax or flash, when i’ve got a desktop i’m working on anyway. whether the desktop is a notebook, mobile phone or normal pc doesn’t matter. whether the application might be mail (imap), rss-reader, icq, skype, etc…
the features of such online desktops are way too restricted but often want to recreate everything. i’m not sure about that approach.
this does not mean that i don’t like some features.
I think the idea is that you have a ‘desktop’ on your PC already, but it’s not available everywhere. By using one of these sites like http://www.protopage.com you can have your desktop and links with you wherever you go.
Conversate is very similar to the Meeting Rooms in the GroupFactor platform. (www.groupfactor.com). (Which has been around for 3 years). Except the Meeting Rooms also take files, as well as “messages” (e-mail – like but faster and more reliable) and also instant “chat”. In addition, in the Meeting Room, you can right-click to create and edit a new page. You can also encrypt everything in the room, transparently (- about to be released). Not only that, but integrated with it is your Private Box, where you keep your documents online and, via right-click menu, can edit, manage, post them anywhere, etc. (For example, via these remote controls, send a private document into a meeting room, without leaving the server). From any PC with Windows/IE.
See an implementation at http://www.quiknets.com. (Go inside as “Guest Visitor”)
Btw- your “desktop” or home page can be personalised very easily.And the system contains an internal, rich, email-type messaging system, very high speed, reliable and encryptable….so you can say that the GroupFactor platform includes, in one piece of integrated software, many of these trendy new Web 2.0 features all wrapped together. (And its built with javascript, com, dhtml, xml et al)
Wow, if I had known there were that many PH’s in the works I never would have started my project… but I started mine before even netvibes was released, so I guess there’s really no way I could have known what was coming. At least in this particular realm decentralisation and competition is not a hindrance (as it is in areas such as email and IM), so at least duplicate work isn’t hurting the industry.
Nader, I agree to David Marsh but there is one more important issue that should be pointed out.
In each computer you’re using you’ll have to install the specific softwares to get the most of your computer use.
This means that you’ll have to buy and install X licenses for Y computer you are using. As a non-corporate consumer this might not be an issue (by downloading wareZ) but for corporates this is expensive and time consuming to maintain. I think you know where I am going with this.
Having said that; even though it’s IE only, it’s worth mentioning;
http://www.chal.../core/index.htm
Best regards,
Hakan Bilgin
There’s one mega issue I have against Netvibes (your favorite): their feed aggregator sucks bandwidth in the worst way:
- they don’t respect TTL
- they don’t support conditional gets (304)
- they don’t support compression
And worst of all: they don’t cache the results, so that for each subscriber, they refetch the feed each time! I was in contact with Florent from netvibes and his response was this: “When netvibes request your feeds it’s because users have them on their pages. So it’s much like users using your feed from desktop rss reader.”
That’s very bad practice!
Hi Alexander,
My answer was related to the fact that you thought netvibes.com was a bot.
We DO cache the results, though we also let the user reload the feed manually and that may be an issue with people abusing of this feature, we may just let them reload from our cache
Hello, I have some screenshots and URLs up at my site. Looks really cool guys! I signed up for beta, I really like the feedroll on alpha0, really sweet!
Sorry for spying out your URL’s, you shouldn’t take them down!! :O)
Check out this fantastic AJAX desktop example, called porcupine:
http://www.innoscript.org/
They have an online demo (link on the left). This is a REAL desktop on the web. They have open sourced this technology, that (on their own words) is:
“Porcupine is a web application server that provides an object oriented framework for developing web applications rapidly.”
I have also looked into innoscript’s porcupine. it’s open, object-oriented and it rocks!
there’s a patent pending for this stuff…
http://cgi.ebay...1QQcmdZViewItem
Looks like more of the same… fold.com has folded
Lets see if anyone comes out with anything better…
sam