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December 18, 2005

Yep, One More Ajax Desktop - Pageflakes

Michael Arrington

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I recently wrote that the Ajax desktop space was getting crazy-crowded. That was before Google released their desktop widget API and favoor launched. And now we have a developer release of a new ajax desktop called Pageflakes (available only in IE).

Pageflakes has a number of features - rss reading, email checking, note taking, searching, etc. It also has a developer API to allow third party module-creation. Given that Microsoft and Google have this feature, it is a must have to even get in the game.

Pageflakes says it is easier to develop modules for their site than for Microst Live or Google - Developers can use MS Visual Studio and they support ASP.NET and Atlas (modules can also be build using PJP or JSP). Of course, overcoming the user loyalty of Netvibes (now a significant source of TechCrunch daily traffic) and the network power of Microsoft and Google will be very difficult.

My current count of ajax/flash desktops is nine:

Who am I missing? Who’s lucky number 10? At this point I’m just writing about these for the fun of it. :-)

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 12:17 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Alterion

    December 18th, 2005 at 1:16 am

    i know your missing at least one.. bacuse i turned up there yesterday .. but these stupid names mean i’ve forgotten it :(

  2. Michael Arrington

    December 18th, 2005 at 1:21 am

    Well, let me know when you remember. I am on a quest to have the definitive list. :-)

  3. Tom

    December 18th, 2005 at 1:22 am

    One could argue that Meebo is an ajax desktop with a single application…instant messaging

  4. .derek

    December 18th, 2005 at 2:02 am

    i think the real issue at hand should be the fact that the service does not support firefox?

  5. Hiten

    December 18th, 2005 at 2:05 am

    This one is not released yet,
    http://www.dashboardhq.com

    more information at:
    http://www.33inc.com

  6. Gagan

    December 18th, 2005 at 2:08 am

    I think you can add Gritwire to this list. Maybe that is your lucky 10 :-).

  7. Eduardo

    December 18th, 2005 at 3:17 am

    Number 10 ccould be eyeOS, at http://eyeos.org, opensource and free

  8. Alterion

    December 18th, 2005 at 4:53 am

    um michael.. i’ve just realised that’s your missing yahoo off that list.. that’s embarassing. i gues my yahoo gets to be no 10. Its also a pretty neat service especiaaly with the integration thngs lke the nbotepad are seeing with yahoo widgets

  9. Phil Ridlen

    December 18th, 2005 at 6:14 am

    Sreejith at http://ajaxblog.com/ mentioned in passing in his latest post http://www.gritwire.com. It’s flash, but if you’re including goowy in this list, I think you should include this one as well. After quickly checking it out, it seems to be pretty neat.

  10. Ethan

    December 18th, 2005 at 7:15 am

    Their website doesn’t support Firefox. As a result, their app doesn’t rate my time. I’ll check out one of the others instead.

  11. Dave Gener

    December 18th, 2005 at 8:24 am

    Hey Michael - ever considered that the only reason you think so highly of Netvibes is that you’re a featured feed on their site? I wonder if you’re biased.

  12. Dave Gener

    December 18th, 2005 at 8:38 am

    And by the way, when I say ‘biased’ - I’m not suggesting misconduct. I’m just saying - if everyone is automatically given a techcrunch feed on their netvibes page, then OF COURSE you’re going to get a ton of traffic from them.

  13. Jason

    December 18th, 2005 at 10:30 am

    I get javascript errors on Pageflakes. IE 6.0.2800. Perhaps they are not quite ready yet??

    Jason

  14. Jeremy Stein

    December 18th, 2005 at 10:32 am

    I guess ajax doesn’t mean that javascript now works…

  15. Rod Edwards

    December 18th, 2005 at 10:55 am

    And no FF support yet - figure they’d want to have that in place given the appeal to the early adopter community that PF would have in common with FF…

  16. Rod Edwards

    December 18th, 2005 at 10:56 am

    Oh, but I guess its “pre-alpha” - so I’ll cut them some slack…

  17. M.

    December 18th, 2005 at 12:48 pm

    No Firefox, no go.

  18. Cameron Olthuis

    December 18th, 2005 at 1:43 pm

    Like others have said… What the hell are they thinking offering this when it’s not compaitable with FF?

    I’m guessing that browser share for their target market is close to 30-40% FF, if not more.

    With 10 other options to choose from you only get one chance to earn my business. You had your chance PF and you blew it.

  19. Dan

    December 18th, 2005 at 2:35 pm

    We wrote one over a weekend a few weeks ago. Didn’t bother to launch it, but if you really need another, we’d be happy to launch it…

  20. anon

    December 18th, 2005 at 4:30 pm

    Michael- why are you still giving these kind of “startups” free publicity? Have they done anything to warrent your or our attention? I think you need to maintain better standards for what can get posted- or like I said, eventually this “web 2.0″ thing is going to really seem like a sham.

  21. hillary

    December 18th, 2005 at 4:35 pm

    so which one is the best — most feature-rich, useful, etc. ??

    do people agree with Hinchcliffe (http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm)?

  22. Christoph Janz

    December 18th, 2005 at 5:34 pm

    Hi everyone,

    With regard to the Firefox issue: Make no mistake about it, we know that we need to support a decent browser. :-)

    Please don’t forget that what can be seen at http://www.pageflakes.com right now is really just a “Developer Release”. We’re not even in alpha yet, and 99% of the functionality is still missing. We’re at a point where others put up a teaser page, but we wanted to show a little more so that developers can start building applications.

    Once we target the general public, we will also support Firefox, of course. Please have a little patience with us…and don’t forget to subscribe to our launch notification. :)

    Best regards

    Christoph Janz
    Pageflakes

  23. Pete

    December 18th, 2005 at 6:57 pm

    I ran across something over at ajaxian, before they shut it down, requiring logins and stuff, called xin.
    ( http://www.naltabyte.se/desktop.asp )
    Something is going on there that’s way more than just a mere ajax desktop, ’cause when I try googleing for ‘rich desktop’, guess what makes the top spot?
    ( http://www.google.com/search?h.....ch+desktop )
    - That’s just wierd..

  24. Chunni Babu

    December 18th, 2005 at 7:11 pm

    I agree with anon. I also would like to ask why you are promoting websites that have nothing to offer yet. YUIEBU is a really cool service, here is the link to their landing page, they have blog where they discuss what they are drinking, and they would like to have your email-id to tell you whenever they are ready with whatever it is they are doing. I just don’t get it.

  25. Michael Arrington

    December 18th, 2005 at 9:25 pm

    Chunni - ’cause I want to. :-)

    I am also an entrepreneur and I know how hard it is to build a company. I’ve chosen to focus this blog on small companies like that. So I’ll keep writing about them (and trust me, there is a ton that I don’t write about).

  26. Chunni Babu

    December 18th, 2005 at 10:26 pm

    Peace! I guess I will have continue ignoring those posts. The reason I read your blog is to be an early adopter of hot new products. I am an entrepreneur myself and I love the fact that entreprenuers find an outlet to the world through you, but a landing page with email box is simply vaporware INMHO.

  27. Michael Arrington

    December 18th, 2005 at 10:28 pm

    yeah, well, you are right. Keep reading. I need the page views. :-)

  28. Michael Arrington

    December 18th, 2005 at 11:45 pm

    No. 10, Phil, I thought about adding gritwire after your comment. I wrote about them earlier this week. While they certainly share some of the attributes of these services, it seems to me that they are primarily positioning themselves as a RSS reader. Disagree?

  29. Mukul Kumar

    December 19th, 2005 at 2:48 am

    Well, there is a whole list published at http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar.....office.php .

    The list goes like this - AjaxOffice, Writely, gOFFICE, NumSum …

    Thanks,
    Mukul.

  30. ThePef

    December 19th, 2005 at 4:02 am

    I would keep a close eye on Meebo. Eventhough the current focus is on IM, there is obviously more desire there.

  31. kaveh

    December 19th, 2005 at 12:55 pm

    Many are mentioned by the readers that I have to check out and add to my list, but ten seems to be the number I had on my list as well.

    Since we are talking about lists, I am maintaining one for bunch of other categories (still working my way through the theme templates and don’t know how to get the comments to work for this page): tech company roundup on twistedblog

  32. Leo

    December 19th, 2005 at 4:49 pm

    Seems to be a lot like netvibes, no? I am not sure if everything seems to be like netvibes (eskobo, especially), or if netvibes is like everything else. However, my vote is for netvibes :-)

  33. Cadence

    December 19th, 2005 at 7:20 pm

    Yeah i was going to say EyeOS too.

  34. Ian Carswell

    December 19th, 2005 at 9:22 pm

    Thanks for remembering us, Gagan. Michael! How soon you seem to have forgotten us :) Working hard on fixing bugs and taking suggestions–hope we can stay on your radar.

  35. Auren Hoffman

    December 24th, 2005 at 2:03 pm

    i would second Meebo. lots of people (especially teenagers) have been using meebo as their active desktop…

  36. webosphere

    December 26th, 2005 at 1:01 am

    A great web2.0 review map is available right here :
    http://webosphere.wordpress.co.....vices-map/

  37. Don

    December 27th, 2005 at 7:26 am

    One of the sites is left off of the personalized portal radar screen is Microsoft’s My MSN. The latest incarnation is actually more attractive to some users than the Live.com/Start.com concept. Drag and Drop, Multiple columns, Web 1.0 and 2.0 content, themes, email preview, favorites, and an add content feature that allows you to approach content from four different views (popular, all content, sorted by provider, and search). Not bad, not bad at all.

    Check out a theme like Windows XP Silver. Very clean. I created a page that mimics Netvibes, Google IG, etc. with the latest Web 2.0 feeds, including TechCrunch. Sure, it’s Microsoft, but this is actually the best Web 1.0 > 2.0 portal conversion I’ve seen. I still prefer the spare interfaces provided by the pure 2.0 personal portals, but I’d use this in a pinch.

    http://my.msn.com

  38. Greg

    December 27th, 2005 at 10:08 am

    The other problem with most of these sites is that they offer no way to view them on mobile devices(PDA, Cell, Blackberry). As a much more mature service, I can view everything on my.yahoo or bloglines on a mobile device, and even Google offes a basic html view for the personalized page that most pda’s can access, albeit with some limits on functionality. Until I have the option to view this information when I’m on the go these services have limited or no value to me.

  39. BlogContestSite.com

    December 31st, 2005 at 7:58 am

    Hey..where is Start.com ? Is that a different breed?

    Jane

  40. Redscowl Bluesingsky

    January 16th, 2006 at 10:56 am

    NICE!! I love this software, it’s awesome with IE!

  41. James Kern

    February 13th, 2006 at 8:12 am

    AJAX Network Neighboorhood.

    Besides desktop, also need a way to navigate your local intranet. SSLBridge
    provides that capability with AJAX.

    http://www.sslbridge.com

  42. Mick

    March 5th, 2006 at 10:39 am

    Dunno guys, check it out. If you are a FF only zealot then ok, but I thought Netvibes was miles ahead of anything I’d seen (as a newcomer to 2.0 stuff) and am blown away by pageflakes - the user interface is great. Tabbed pages, tabbed to-do lists, 100x cleaner look, its like moving from Netvibes is like moving from command-line prompt to a GUI for the first time, from black & white to colur, you get the drift.

  43. Fubix

    March 22nd, 2006 at 5:43 am

    yEAP ..Web will be better

  44. JG

    April 11th, 2006 at 6:13 pm

    This website http://www.pageflakes.com is unbelievable !!!

  45. Mike

    May 8th, 2006 at 11:13 am

    Found another http://www.yoosi.com

  46. Jimie

    May 15th, 2006 at 3:26 pm

    Here is one more - http://www.startforce.jp

  47. Seychellois

    June 28th, 2006 at 2:38 am

    Seychelles Islands
    Republic of Seychelles

  48. Seychelles Islands

    June 28th, 2006 at 2:41 am

    Here is one more
    http://www.republic-of-seychelles.com

  49. egon

    June 29th, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    some of those are pretty cool. i swore by netvibes there for a while. everything about it is great, but a few months ago it just didnt load anymore. not on my home or work computer, it would not let me logon so i lost everything. it really sucks, and they wont email me back or help :(

    i like the eyeOS, whoever suggested that, thanks. i think im gonna use that. i believe thats the direction we are going to go too, where everything is web based, it wont even matter which os you use.

  50. ketan

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:42 am

    hi what kind of feature developers used to develop a website like pageflakes and netvibes.com?
    how thery have used webparts feature ,and how they interacted with flash,ajax …tell me more abt developing a this kind a site ..if u have larger content to say u can mail me my id is ketan_raval_7@yahoo.com
    i ll wait for ur reply impatiently

  51. ketan

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:44 am

    hi what kind of features ,developers have used to develop a website like pageflakes and netvibes.com?
    how thery have used webparts feature ,and how they interacted with flash,ajax …tell me more abt developing a this kind a site ..if u have larger content to say u can mail me my id is ketan_raval_7@yahoo.com
    i ll wait for ur reply impatiently

  52. rc

    October 5th, 2006 at 11:18 am

    Spent time working on a nice little page at net flakes and then got locked out. Resonded to there helpline. Said they couldn’t get into it either and were having they’re “debugger”. IF he couldn’t figure it out I would have to start anew. SInce ot hearing back from them I inquired as to status. No respose. If that is they’re service now, what will it be when they get busy? rc

  53. EX

    October 9th, 2006 at 7:17 pm

    Besides desktop, also need a way to navigate your local intranet. SSLBridge
    provides that capability with AJAX.

    http://domains.optionextreme.com/

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