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July 24, 2006

Nowsy: New Ajax Home Page

Michael Arrington

21 comments »

There is something unique about Netherlands based Nowsy. It’s an Ajax home page that has many of the features of funded startups like Netvibes and Pageflakes (and Google IG and about ten other unfunded sites).

Nowsy does not have all of the bells and whistles of Netvibes or Pageflakes, but it does have most of the basics - easy module additions based on RSS feeds, Drag, drop and delete functionality to tailor the page to your liking, and easy new page creation.

There is one thing Nowsy is doing differently than the other services, and it’s smart. They’ve added a search box at the top of the site that queries all of the services in all of the modules on a page when you enter a search term (I assume they are doing this by indexing the feeds on their own servers for later searches by users). If you’ve added your favorite sites to Nowsy, the search feature is very useful.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 8:22 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.

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  1. Nowsy Start Page at Ministry of Tech

    July 24th, 2006 at 8:57 pm

  2. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Nowsy： Ajax利用の新カスタムホームページサービス

    July 24th, 2006 at 10:55 pm

  3. Bitelia » Nowsy, otra página de inicio personalizada en AJAX

    July 25th, 2006 at 12:49 am

  4. StephenZhai's blog

    July 25th, 2006 at 1:55 am

  5. Nowsy > Netvibes | blog.ftofani.com

    July 25th, 2006 at 6:27 am

  6. Nowsy > Netvibes | blog.ftofani.com

    July 25th, 2006 at 6:27 am

  7. Dead2.0 » Howsy Boutsy Nowsy? Nopesy!

    July 25th, 2006 at 6:37 am

  8. Changing Way » Blog Archive » Personalized Start Pages

    July 26th, 2006 at 5:56 am

  9. Web2.0Fan.net

    July 27th, 2006 at 3:12 pm

Comments

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  1. Eric Willis

    July 24th, 2006 at 8:50 pm

    The ability to search makes Flowsy much more userful for me in comparison to netvibes, pageflakes, etc.

    Mike, this must be a record for number of posts for you here in one day…everytime I refresh the page there is a new review up…

  2. Michael Arrington

    July 24th, 2006 at 8:54 pm

    It’s Nowsy, not Flowsy. :-)

    Big news day. Lots I missed actually.

  3. Eric Willis

    July 24th, 2006 at 9:07 pm

    NOWSY…2am here..the later it gets the least likely I am to spellcheck,etc…ironically that is usually when I most need to…

    I am waiting to see what you dig up on the Venice Project. I actually first heard about it a month ago from the founder of an outsourcing firm…However, he could only divulge a limited amount of details. Hopefully, you get some details..I am very interested in it…meanwhile I am going to continue to bug him about giving me more details..but I digress…

  4. JOJOFACE

    July 24th, 2006 at 9:08 pm

    Aesthetically, it’s not very appealing at all, and the search option just isn’t enough to make me switch from Netvibes. ^_^

  5. Matt Browdy

    July 24th, 2006 at 9:45 pm

    Inspired by popurls.com, eh?

  6. Gavin

    July 25th, 2006 at 3:05 am

    This is real cool. At first I thought: not another Ajax homepage, but this one is clearly something different. It may be inspired by popurls, but it offers so much more. Now I can search all the sources, add the sources I like, and shuffle them around. Popurls is just a list of static feeds.

    They do need to work on the design. I like simple, but this is a little too simple. But the search feature rocks.

  7. Kris Tuttle

    July 25th, 2006 at 4:08 am

    Google works pretty well. I try these others from time to time but it seems that once you have one of these set up and customized as I do Google it would take a great deal to move to something else. I have to expect Google to stay in business and keep improving their offering over time. ;-)

  8. Marcus

    July 25th, 2006 at 4:45 am

    Every time a review on TechCrunch has to specify what makes a site “unique” from the dozens of other clone-sites, it’s like a guarantee that the site is just that–a clone with a new feature or two. If you don’t care about that feature or don’t need it right away then you might as well stick with what Google or Yahoo or whoever the biggest player is because they’ll probably get around to adding it later anyway.

    That sounds really critical–I’m actually glad that you review these new sites and (like in the case of Nowsy) I think that they’re interesting and fun to play around with for a few minutes. What I don’t understand is how you can start a business off a single feature or two and convince people that that feature or two is worth switching for. It must be a tough marketing task.

  9. Matt

    July 25th, 2006 at 6:17 am

    “(I assume they are doing this by indexing the feeds on their own servers for later searches by users)”

    C’mon Michael, you’re smarter than that! Try again…

  10. mirpod

    July 25th, 2006 at 7:21 am

    It’s not a full AJAX page (see the url). For example the YouTube module:

    http://www.nowsy.com/view_youtube.php?b=31216

    And we can’t see the videos!! Sorry but we can’t compare this page with Netvibes or PageFlakes, even with Webpi Ajax Page dedicated to podcasting

    http://mirpod.com/webpi.php

  11. Thomas Marban

    July 25th, 2006 at 9:31 am

    hi there, just came across the mention of my site popurls.com and wanted to annotate that it’s a content aggregator (social, web buzz, bla) width an “editorial” selection of popular sources and _not_ a custom feed reader, aggregator, dashboard or web x.0 desktop.
    just my 2 cents

    @marcus, i agree with you

  12. dude999

    July 25th, 2006 at 7:59 pm

    http://www.thefinalanswertoeverything.com/
    Pretty cool stuff, now if only it came with cheesy puffs.

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