Israeli personalized news site Spotback released upgrades to its interface and a couple of new features. If you missed our initial review back in May, this is a good time to check out the site.
As a personalized news page, Spotback learns from your clicks and ratings to automatically prioritize news sources and items over time. It competes primarily with Findory on personalization and a long list of Ajax start pages for news.
The first feature in the upgrade is the new landing page, which asks what your interests described in single words and gives snide responses to each entry. Those tags then make up the basis for your basic news. Spotback is all about news search, something the other competitors emphasize far less. Mike Arrington thinks this mandatory screen asking you about your interests is deeply annoying, but I think he’s wrong. It’s a perfectly logical way to populate a news page, though it might be nice to have the option to skip it for people like Mike!
The second new feature is keyword alerts. New keyword search results can be delivered by email or RSS at a frequency of your choice. The alerts function is awkward right now but sounds like a good idea if the company can make it as usable as the rest of the site.
Search results can be added directly to your startpage, and this is important. When you enter search terms you’re able to narrow your query through two layers of categories – great for reducing junk results.
Finally, in addition to the standard drag and drop layout of modules, you’re also able to configure multiple viewing profiles. A single click can switch between them. So I might have one group of headlines I want to see at the top of my page first thing in the morning, but another configuration for the weekends – business and pleasure. That’s a very nice feature.
In as much as it competes with startpages, Spotback is in an incredibly crowded space online. The two leaders are probably Paris and London based Netvibes (who recieved $15 million more in venture funding two weeks ago) and Germany’s Pageflakes, another venture backed startpage company. There are quite a few others as well.
None the less, Spotback is particularly smart, functional and appealing vs the startpages, and that’s what I’d use it for if anything. Most of the other services are competing on diversity of modules, partnerships and actions you can perform from their site. Offering search, switchable layouts and learned prioritization are all very smart. Whether Spotback can make the transition from being cool to building the kinds of user numbers that some of their competitors have remains to be seen (Netvibes reported having 4 million users after 9 months online), but startpages are widely expected to be a big growth area in consumer facing web services so there may be no reason that a new leader couldn’t emerge. If RSS is too complicated for mass adoption in most of its incarnations, startpages may be what changes that. RSS is great, but RSS with search is much better.
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an advisor to Spotback.
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This is another great Web 2.0 web app. We will continue to see the see more web apps becoming more user center instead of system centered. RSS is a revolutionary mechanism is changing our Internet experience and will continue to do so. More functionality = More Happy customers= More Capitals. I am glad the web service engineers are listening. Power to the People.
I think I will stick with my Rss Reader for now. In the case of news feeds, for me at least, less is more.
I don’t get all the web 2.0 world. I want to know what is the parallels to web 2.0 in the real world? What does it relate to? Throwing a bunch of ajax code isn’t cutting it for me. The concepts I see are really weak.
For a web 2.0 to be successful, or for web 1.0 or whatever nifty geeky name you want to call it, to become successful, you need to have a really strong philosophical concept put together, implemented well.
So far what I see is some nice implementations of 2 cents concepts. This is not sustainable.
im with you sal – alot of what i am seeing in the web 2.0 seems pretty thin, the broader power of opening up the web so that its bottom up rather than top down on the other hand is amazing … you tube, my space, etc. = netscape 1.0
will be great to see what unfolds – 1 in every 100 mutation of web 2.0 will breed something better.
I don’t get it.
Netvibes – $15 million – for what? There has been nothing innovative in the tech sector that has come out of London or Paris in recent years, and Netvibes just proves that. It’s a bland interface – anyone would be better off using MyYahoo or personalizing their Google page.
Spotback at least looks interesting, with a fun to use interface. However it is unlikely that they would be able to compete with Google or Yahoo in this arena – digg would probably have more success with this.
I love the new landing page. It reduces the overwhelming wow-this-is-too-much that I had with the previous approach. And, like everything else in Spotback, ajax is put to a great use again!
Are they up against Microsoft’s Start.com??
Startups.in/India
(Nag .B)
Mike’s right – the startup screen is annoying. Fndory oes the personalized news thing a lot better – just start reading & it will adapt
they should enable you to upload your opml
Ah, classic example of ajax at its worst.. what the hell are they thinking.. the useability is awful…
seriously…there are NO “drag and drop layout of modules” as stated above
Paul, when configuring a layout I was dragging and dropping all night last night. It’s not directly from the front page though. It’s on the customize layout page.
Marshall, I think that’s a relevant difference. The ajax home pages allow dragging at any time, which is different than just during admin.
ahh..gotcha..i do see the draggable, but like michael said- relevant and considerable difference. Plus, there is only an option to have 1 or 2 columns
I don’t consider this as a startpage only, because this one is more than that.It do many things that Netvibes and Pageflakes is not able to such as learn as you go…rating content etc.
On the other hand the so called Ajax startpages are just summarizing the feed we gave.But this is automatic, completely.
I think this is a good competition to Google News, because its Reccomendation feature is very powerful.
So IMO this one is a good buy for Yahoo! to integrate with its News site ( http://www.news.yahoo.com/tech )
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