We’ve tracked a bunch of customizable, Ajax-rich home pages over the last couple of years. At one point it seemed like a new one was launching every week.
New ones are still launching (here’s a promising one in beta), and the youngsters, Netvibes and Pageflakes, are showing the most energy and creativity. See, for example, Netvibe’s new effort to create cross platform widgets, and Pageflake’s really cool new video search/notification widget.
Neither of those services, though, have grown large enough to be tracked by Comscore. The big old Internet giants own this space, and will continue to do so in the near future.
That doesn’t mean they are keeping pace with the innovators, though. Netscape relaunched their personalized home page a week ago, and we panned it. Others, with a sense of nostalgia for the Netscape of yesteryear, cried foul. Their line of argument seems to be that since Netscape has been around for a long time it deserves special consideration.
But people vote with their mouse, and Netscape has so little market share that it can’t lose much more and still be ranked by Comscore. Even when combined with the unique users of the My AOL service, they are dead last.
January worldwide Comscore numbers show that the My Yahoo personalized home page has more users, with just over 50 million, than all of its competitors combined.
All Yahoo has to do is remain competitive, and their massive user base will keep them at the top of the pile. Their recent enhancements are a good first step. Now they need to focus on integrating their Konfabulator desktop widget platform into My Yahoo as well – widget compatibility is an area where they are noticeably lagging Microsoft and Google.
Maybe these sites are just on artificial life support. If the big 3 didn’t bother sending users to these sites most people wouldn’t much care. The standard internet user experience shouldn’t start from a “start” page. It’s going to be either google.com or myspace.com
You might want to also check out something called PersonalWeb, too. It’s another one of these Web 2.0 personalized home page things.
http://www.personalweb.com
…can’t…test…any…more…ajax…homepages
How bad off is Yahoo that they can’t compete money-wise even though they really kick rear in a lot of areas traffic-wise? Sad sad sad.
You didn’t mention Protopage ( http://www.protopage.com ) – one of the most innovative start pages, but often ignored because it did not take high profile VC funding.
Yahoo is going to be the market leader in this segment for a while…
I have been using netvibes for a while now, started out with google but what attracted me to netvibes was it’s innovative nature. Back when I switched google didn’t have tabs on it’s personal home page service and it was exactly that that attracted me to netvibes. Irony is that I don’t use tabs anymore.
In order to “make” it in the home page business, I think the ability to customize and develop your own modules plays a big role. If I can add my own (specialized) content to my netvibes page, it makes me less likely to switch to other services. Developing easy to use tools for adding content might just be the key to success.
Its strange that ajax is such hot news these days. I mean it really is nothing new. In fact I remember on my old sinclar spectrum 48k back in the eighties I could knock up something with ajax style in ‘basic’ that could be pulled out of a magazine (those games never worked… what was that all about?).
“…can’t…test…any…more…ajax…homepages”, maybe you have to transform TechCrunch home page into an Ajax home page
Just wondering what business model folks at Pageflakes, Netvibes and others are following if the market seems to be highly occupied by the giants.
I think that Netvibes already has more users than that. A year ago Martin Varsarvsky (Fon founder and investor in Netvibes) said in his blog that Netvibes had more than a million users.
http://english....l/netvibes.html
After that I have read several times that they were growing a lot, so the number should be higher today.
In my case, I use it basically as a rss reader, but I also check gmail accounts, my calendar, my to do lists and a few more apps. I love it.
we’d like to thank Michael for the honorable mention – we’d also like to say that we agree with David Bloomer above – it’s hard to get noticed when you’re not one of the companies receiving high profile VC funding (yet)
the name behind the link in Michael’s article above is schmedley
http://www.schmedley.com
Our goal is to keep giving our users what they want by adding more features that THEY vote on – and by adding increased functionality and customization to a great user experience – we feel this is what makes a “startpage” great.
Does anyone know how many users netvibes has? As Fernando rightly says (#10), they have had ‘1 million users’.
I think netvibes offers a superior product to many of the big boys above, but doesn’t have the word of mouth and market cap that the others gain simply from a large userbase on their other products.
I think this catagory is locked up! Why would any venture capitilist invest in another startup with the same basic idea?
- google only got investment cause
1) it was only 100k
2) it was radically different and (better?)
I don’t use a personal homepage and haven’t for years. Instead I just have a long list of RSS feeds I scan regularly but I really liked the interface for schmedly(sp?)
Schmedley – I’m really liking your version of the personalized homepage. I’ve always been a big fan of Apple’s Dashboard (your inspiration, yes?). It’s clean, it’s easy, it’s pretty, very customizable – and best of all there’s no long, overwhelming column of feeds/bookmarks like we see on the Netvibes start page.
I’ve already started playing with schmedley – I’ll post my comments on my blog (linked to my name).
Mike, a few comments.
1. I was commenting on reviews from a range of bloggers, not just TechCrunch, although I definitely had read your review.
2. It was this statement, from the TechCrunch review, that caught my eye: “AOL is clearly taking good ideas from new startups and seeing if their users will consume them.” I wanted to get on the record saying that it’s not fair to say that the flow is *exclusively* in the direction from startups to AOL. My.Netscape came way before any of them existed, and many of them (Netvibes, Pageflakes) are the descendents of My.Netscape. They do much the same thing.
I think credit should go to the real innovators. It seems wrong to me when newcomers get credit for the innovative work of others who came before them.
Michael — How exactly is the term “users” of a homepage defined. Is everyone who has ever had an account (and so like google IG has a home page as one of their services) defined as having a homepage — even if the homepage is never or rarely used?
Dave — While netscape and others may deserve credit for being the granddaddy of personal homepages, they have fallen waaaaaay behind. If netvibes and pageflakes “do the same thing” as netscape then they are “doing it” much better relative to their competitors these days. Competition is the name of the game. Give netscape a nice plaque and a gold watch for their service to the computer world, if you want, but most folks don’t care about yesterday’s stale donut.
David8, okay with me. But don’t criticize them for lifting the idea from their grandchildren. That’s not fair.
New or not, I like AJAX. It’s very sexy for the end user experience.
Sure, I have a My Yahoo page, but that doesn’t mean that I use it.
My.Yahoo.com has a big market share because its set as the default homepage in many of the old pc’s… Actually i read somewhere that less than 20% of my.yahoo.com users even bothered to customize their start page.
This makes me seriously doubt that this new wave of web 2.0 start pages are ever going to cross into the mainstream. One more thing is this start pages rely on outside sources for the content (via widgets). So the load time is always going to be slow and the mainstream users hate it (speed is reason many of them have a blank page as their homepage)
Yes! This survey looks like if Yahoo have asked for it!
Does somebody believe these figures are actual? Come on guys
They recently updated they look to be more ‘modern’, but are at least a year behind the rest.
Ajax home pages should start around the email/blogging application – since that is where most users will start out.
Gmail should implement a tabbed interface………
I just wanted to say that even though it’s pretty basic right now, I took a look at Smedley and it DOES look nice. It has possibilities. Now if they could make it possible to DELETE as well as add feeds and get rid of the ads, that would be a good start. Toss in a video widget too…
David8,
thanks for the kind words. You can delete RSS Feeds from the RSS channel, where you can administer your saved list of feeds – the RSS schmidget just gives you a quick way to add one easily. Some of our channels (where there is a full-page web application dedicated to that area of content) have a corresponding schmidget on our homepage that offers quick access to summary information from that channel and/or its settings. The same goes for our Stocks channel and schmidget, Weather, etc.
As for the ads – they’ll probably be sticking around a little while longer – the upside is that you can position your schmidgets to obscure them if you’d like
the schmedley team