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February 20, 2007

YourMinis Seeks to Relaunch the Startpage

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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The already highly competitive startpage space saw an interesting new play tonight when YourMinis.com relaunched with a changed site and a new strategy.  

YourMinis is a beautiful aggregation of RSS feeds and web functionality that competes with Pageflakes, Netvibes and a long list of other startpage services.  YourMinis reports having more than 800,000 user accounts but remains well behind its leading competitors.  It does score high in the Wow department - I’ve never added a live PandaCam from the San Diego Zoo to Netvibes with two clicks, for example.

Just minutes ago the site relaunched with an HTML home page placing new emphasis on highlighting users, featured widgets and topical widget collections.  The startpage has been moved to yourminis.com/start Over the next few weeks the company will roll out a public API for developers to use in building their own YourMinis widgets.  

The company will also demonstrate integration with Apollo at the Adobe conference next week - meaning that YourMinis widgets will be able to be constructed on the web and used on the desktop.

Highlighting the social in a startpage application sounds interesting, but I’m not sure how much demand there is for it.  I would love to be proven wrong about that - may a million minis bloom and be gobbled up by users hungry for well compiled startpage tabs.  Looking at the featured Chicago Cubs page that appears on the left (as a mini mini, if you will) I can imagine the appeal.  Top blogs, video sources and other dynamic feeds on a given topic compiled by someone who wants to share their knowledge on that topic.  Unfortunately things like that have been tried many times already. Presumably being ugly isn’t the only problem with Squidoo, for example.

A good API and Apollo integration could be interesting but I think the strength of YourMinis will remain the sharp visual appeal of the service and its solid handling of the basics.  If that’s not good enough to build traction for the company in the face of as much competition as it faces, I don’t know what will be.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 11:14 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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Comments

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  1. Josh Wais

    February 20th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    What an awesome site! You’re right on about yourminis Marshall. I’ve been using it for a while now and I love it. Like you said, the visuals, the functionality, it’s all just really well done. And also, I think it stands out enough to make it really strong competition for the established guys out there. Anyway… I’m a fan.

  2. visible.mobi

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:21 am

    The new start page looks awesome !

  3. David Sissitka

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:49 am

    I love how the scroll bars bust out of minis and off the page, I wonder how they managed that in Flash.

  4. Andy

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:57 am

    Those scroll bars are flash managed, not browser managed. They don’t even look like the standard scroll bar widgets (at least on my platform, FF on Linux)

  5. Stephen

    February 21st, 2007 at 1:45 am

    Has it really come to the point that startups are scraping the bottom of the barrel with stupid domains like “YourMinis”? In the old days such a name in and of itself would disqualify a company from any serious attention — from consumers and investors.

  6. Bijay Rungta

    February 21st, 2007 at 1:47 am

    Awesome functionality and Design.
    The only negative side is that it uses Flash.
    Would have been great if one could do the same using Javascript and no Flash (i.e. without the user having to install a plugin in their browser)

  7. Jenny

    February 21st, 2007 at 2:11 am

    did anyone hear about IFocus? Instead of start pages your can clip the content of websites and view them even if you are not surfing the web.

    Here is a demo movie:
    http://www.getifocus.com/video.html

    And the home page:
    http://www.getifocus.com

  8. Mikael Bergkvist

    February 21st, 2007 at 3:44 am

    The connection between the desktop and the webapps is growing stronger.
    With xindesk, (http://www.xindesk.com) soon to be launched, any and all applications developed for the online desktop also works for the windows desktop.

  9. SearcH EngineS WeB

    February 21st, 2007 at 4:00 am

    This is one of the best - it allows creating a public URL to share and access anywhere. Set up & Creation, from start to finish was about 5 minutes

    http://www.yourminis.com/yourm.....ngines/Web :-D

  10. Danny (Mesa Dynamics)

    February 21st, 2007 at 6:17 am

    Actually, you can run YourMinis widgets on the desktop now (both in Windows Vista’s Sidebar and OS X’s Dashboard) using our Amnesty Generator. Althougth our “autofill” feature is still being worked on (thus manual entry of name, width and heigtht are required), full support will be coming soon for those too lazy to type. ;-)

    Nevertheless, I imagine YourMinis widgets will expose advanced features/content when run in their desktop environment, so it’ll be interesting how they decide to add enough value to convince people to download YADWE (yet another desktop widget environent).

  11. Andrew

    February 21st, 2007 at 7:40 am

    “I’ve never added a live PandaCam from the San Diego Zoo to Netvibes with two clicks.”
    Several reactions:
    - I should have known that it would come to this.
    - Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
    - Startpage space jumps shark by spying on panda.

  12. Jeff

    February 21st, 2007 at 7:47 am

    One interesting thing is that by using Flash these guys can have a widget run in the browser as part of the start page, as an embed on any site, and with Apollo on the desktop. Throw in Flash Lite support for mobile and you have a very compelling value proposition - ie consume rich content anyway, anywhere, that the other players will have a hard time matching.

  13. www.youtubesearcher.com

    February 21st, 2007 at 7:51 am

    Ugly does not does preclude you from succeeding. The 2 prime examples of this in my opinion are …

    reddit and craigslist

    Similarly, there are plenty of “pretty” sites that are failures just because no one visists them.

  14. toobit

    February 21st, 2007 at 8:27 am

    Flash and good visual design. The bar is set low guys. They did a great job yes, but who is really going to innovate? More to come…..:)

  15. ori

    February 21st, 2007 at 10:25 am

    Will any of these solutions, Netvibes, YourMinis, etc. solve the problem of different language encoding which is not English/Western. As encoding cannot be configured, languages like Hebrew cannot be supported….

  16. Gavan Woolery

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:00 am

    It may (or may not) be true that there is a limited appeal in sharing start pages, but as we expand our widget collection we hope that people will be developing even more exciting pages (not necessarily just of the “start page” variety) to share with other community members.

  17. drew olanoff

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:29 am

    been a fan of the goowy/yourminis guys for quite a while now. the social aspect of the start page has been missing until now. that sounds fanboyish but it’s true. try out yourminis before you judge.

  18. Sam the Hired Man

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:29 pm

    It only took one right click on one of the widgets for me to generate a fatal browser error in Firefox/Windows, thus inducing a browser crash.

    More hypeware.

  19. bdb

    February 21st, 2007 at 1:39 pm

    @Danny
    I would hardly call Apollo YADWE. How about some more FUD to prop up the value of AG? I only want one, and I don’t want one from any company whose revenues are reliant on OS or advertising sales. I also really like the idea of desktop application abilities. The value will be added by numerous companies providing Apollo applications; these guys are just early adopters.

  20. Danny (Mesa Dynamics)

    February 21st, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    @bdb
    By YADWE I meant YourMinis-on-the-desktop *not* Apollo.

    My bet is that in order to control YourMinis on the desktop, the user will have to download a widget management platform (hence YADWE) built on top of Apollo. However, if YourMinis plans on simply pushing their widgets onto the desktop as individual Apollo applets, then I stand corrected. We’ll see.

  21. arifsali

    February 21st, 2007 at 2:27 pm

    Much better than the first time around. I’m a Netvibes fan but I am looking for either one of them to provide a feature to save or tag my RSS feeds.

  22. David Mackey

    February 21st, 2007 at 5:03 pm

    I think an open API is going to be essential to the success of any start page.

  23. Hart

    February 22nd, 2007 at 1:11 am

    @Danny

    I’m currently developing the apollo platform for yourminis. To clear up your question, yourminis will run natively in Apollo, not as another application on top of it. It will likely be a one time Apollo app install, after which you can seamlessly add and remove widgets at will. We agree as much as you do that the last thing the world needs yet another widget platform.

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