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

Gmail should implement a tabbed interface………

They recently updated they look to be more ‘modern’, but are at least a year behind the rest.

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)

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.

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.

I’ve already started playing with schmedley - I’ll post my comments on my blog (linked to my name).

- google only got investment cause
1) it was only 100k
2) it was radically different and (better?)

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.

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.

http://english.martinvarsavsky.....vibes.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.

Just wondering what business model folks at Pageflakes, Netvibes and others are following if the market seems to be highly occupied by the giants.