« Previous post
Next post »

January 1, 2006

The HomePortals Extensible Home Page

Michael Arrington

26 comments »

Add HomePortals to the ever growing list of customizable homepages/desktops.

HomePortals is really unique in that every module is customizable, and can interface with other web services. So you can create a new module (and allows others to copy it), and/or modify attributes of an existing one.

For instance, there is a pre-created module to show recent del.icio.us bookmarks for a given user, recent flickr pictures for a given user, etc. I have not seen this type of functionality in the other services I’ve reviewed.

HomePortals also has a very nice blogging tool module (see it in action on the HomePortals blog). Now this is getting interesting: I can see using the blogging tool, and adding in my flickr pictures and del.icio.us bookmarks to give visitors a really in depth overview of who I am and what’s going on in my life. It’s like SuprGlu, but the blogging tool is built in, not pulled in.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2006 at 8:33 pm 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.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Ondas, cables, luces, cacharritos y cachivaches » HomePortals: Homepage extensible

    January 2nd, 2006 at 1:20 pm

  2. Innerphaze » Blog Archive » links for 2006-01-03

    January 2nd, 2006 at 8:38 pm

  3. TechCrunch » The HomePortals Extensible Home Page

    January 24th, 2006 at 7:01 pm

  4. TechCrunch » Yes! This Week’s Ajax Homepage

    January 25th, 2006 at 11:58 pm

  5. TechCrunch en français » La page d’accueil en ajax de la semaine

    February 5th, 2006 at 5:58 am

  6. TechCrunch » Fold.com - Why?

    February 28th, 2006 at 10:14 pm

  7. BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture » Blog Archive » ThoughtFiler: Reasons I should not bother…

    March 14th, 2006 at 4:36 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Alan

    January 1st, 2006 at 9:01 pm

    Honestly, dude, enough with the customizable homepages.

  2. Ravneet

    January 1st, 2006 at 9:40 pm

    Nice review Mike. coldfusion ! woah !

  3. Anonymis

    January 1st, 2006 at 9:50 pm

    its an open source ajax homepage with web based xml editing and its cool its almost like an live.com where you can edit someone elses stuff

  4. Michael Arrington

    January 1st, 2006 at 9:54 pm

    Alan, dude…either go non-anonymous or kill the condescension.

  5. Chunni Babu

    January 1st, 2006 at 10:43 pm

    Not sure if anyone has used it yet, but I suggest the name Portal 2.0 for these things. Remember the crazy onslaught of portal applications during the late 90s, in the peak of of Web 1.0 bubble? Remember Jetspeed? Weblogic Portal? It will be not long before some company like IBM will create a one of these apps for the corporate world and sell it to management with a tagline like - “all the company’s info in the employee’s fingertip”

  6. will

    January 2nd, 2006 at 1:16 am

    “there is a pre-created module to show recent del.icio.us bookmarks for a given user, recent flickr pictures for a given user, etc. I have not seen this type of functionality”

    Well that is one reason Netvibes is so great. They regularly add new modules like their nice flickr module - and i have my del.ici.ous bookmarks there as well via RSS. Stuff added since your last visit i guess. (a ToDO module was added just a few days ago).

    Homeportals does seem interesting. It is harder to configure than most but it looks like this gives it far more flexibility - for those comfortable with XML/html and whatever.

    Definitely needs some work - virtually no help/tutorials yet…. I can’t get my flickr account to show and it won’t remember my gmail account on refresh as two of a few examples.

    But again, the ability to highly detail makes it interesting.

    Regards

  7. testboy

    January 2nd, 2006 at 3:53 am

    netvibes.com has a flickr module and a del.icio.us one is soon to come. have a look at http://www.netvibes.com/blog/ . they are constantly adding new features!

  8. Yosef

    January 2nd, 2006 at 7:25 am

    To me the power with this is the ability to share desktops. Does netvibes have this ability? This is like a social bookmarking site, but it is social desktoping site or social portal site. I think it is really neat. I do think they need to get a dedicated domain name as cfempire seems to be their development site and this is one of their projects.

    It would be neat if we could have our own domains for our desktops such as yosef.cfempire.com or cfempire.com/yosef

  9. Saleel

    January 2nd, 2006 at 8:26 am

    This seems like a lot more complicated and different from all the other startup pages. Ofcourse, to a nonprograming shmuck, like myself, most of this only looks pretty.

  10. Mark

    January 2nd, 2006 at 9:05 am

    So now there are at least ten customizable Ajax web portal/homepages. With what criteria do you evaluate these sites? How does one decide which is best? What would the perfect Ajax portal include, and how would it work?
    Love Chunni’s observations-about the naming, and the corporate idea. I would love an Ajax portal on my company intranet.

  11. Oscar

    January 2nd, 2006 at 12:33 pm

    Yosef, you can access user’s pages directly by going to cfempire/accounts/user_name, we wanted to do it using subdomains but we had trouble doing this with our hosting company.
    Thanks for the input!

  12. Ted Smith

    January 2nd, 2006 at 12:37 pm

    Networking: Convergence comes to China
    A number of converged network communications projects are expected to move forward in China this year — with wired and wireless elements — spanning from Shanghai to Beijing, experts tell United Press International’s Networking.
    One of the biggest networking projects is China’s landmark west-east gas pipeline project (WEPP), which has selected an IP-based converged networking solution from Nortel to power voice and multimedia communications, both wired and wireless, along its 4,200-kilometer route. Operated by PetroChina Company Ltd., a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. By Gene Koprowski

  13. Oscar

    January 2nd, 2006 at 2:28 pm

    Yosef, you can access a user’s page directly by going to cfempire.com/accounts/account_name. That will take you to the user’s public page.
    We are still working on improving the site, and all your comments are an invaluable help. Thanks!

  14. Ed Dunn

    January 2nd, 2006 at 4:51 pm

    #10 Mark,

    I think these drag-drop portals will continue to increase in numbers as they are somewhat based on the same open source framework.

    Basically it will come down to preference and i think those that can find a niche will do good,regardless of the number of drag-drop portals in the space. I personally like protopage but waiting for one that is seriously about becoming a niche and not offer commoditized services.

  15. Ed Dunn

    January 2nd, 2006 at 4:53 pm

    Can I comment?

  16. Kevin Smokler

    January 3rd, 2006 at 1:14 am

    Seems like ubergeeks only at this point. Why can’t you simple drag and drop a .doc to do list in for example?

  17. Mike Moschini

    January 3rd, 2006 at 2:10 am

    This portal is by far the best looking to come out in a quite a while. I’ve tried it out and as mentioned before there is little to no help documentation. Additionally, the biggest issue facing these Ajax web portals is a serious lack of bookmarking functionality. by that I mean a easy way to port your bookmarks/favorites to the main page. Another problem is the issue of clicking on a bookmark link and it doesn’t open in a new tab. Kind of silly if your using the portal as you home page and you click on something and the page is replaced.

  18. Greg Pentland

    May 21st, 2006 at 10:12 pm

    Ive been doing quite a bit of portal resaearch, and they all seem to be lacking the complete intergrated package,,, security, Document managment? document searching? built in calendars?

    Ive found personal ones that are cool - http://www.netvibes.com,

    the only web2.0 one ive found is http://www.ovosuite.com that has a complete solution. Pitty its not live yet.

  19. John Nail

    June 7th, 2006 at 8:11 am

    While all these portals are “cool” the real issue is finding one that can scale to support true enterprise (2.0) use and HomePortals does just that.
    I looked at all of them and HomePortals is the only one that I found that is serious about offering business tools which turns into real paying customers.
    It is flexible and can support real customization in all sorts of content, style sheets and true custom web design.
    Check out http://www.theindustryradar.com to see a real enterprise tool built on HomePortals with total customization.
    I needed a real business infrastructure to drive our site and HomePortals provided it!

« Previous post
Next post »