Preview of Pageflakes “Flurry” Release
Michael Arrington
48 comments »
Personalized home page startup Pageflakes is under new management. The Benchmark-funded startup opened an office in Silicon Valley and brought on Dan Cohen, who previously led the teams working on Google IG and then My Yahoo, as CEO.
He’s made some noticeable changes already. Last month they quietly launched a video widget that pulls videos from major video sharing sites based on a keyword. I actually passed on covering it, but have since become hooked on the module and it’s become a sort of personal tv channel on my start page. This morning they will launch a new set of features designed to make creating a new home page as easy as possible.
There are two features think are worth noting in the release - personalization and a number of very cool RSS/widget features.
Personalization
Like the recent My Yahoo release, Pageflakes will focus on customization as soon as you come to the site. Unlike Yahoo, they don’t have a lot of data on your prior web usage, so they will ask you a few questions to start. You pick the things you are interested in - news, sports, tech, gossip, food, games, etc. and tell it your city or zip/postal code. Pageflakes will then build you a personalized start page with pre-populated modules (they call them “flakes”). Weather, local news and local events are set to the user’s location, and can be edited or removed for different content via an Ajax interface.
RSS And Widget Features
Any module on a pageflakes page can be turned into a widget and placed on another site. Above I’ve embedded a widget for the TechCrunch RSS module, but this works for any widget.
By far the most interesting new feature, however, is the “power user” RSS reader. Pageflakes and other Ajax home page sites provide a very good view of RSS information, but only for a few sites. Too many feeds on a page and it gets too cluttered. I use Pageflakes to read a few key feeds multiple times per day, and Google Reader for reading a much longer list of feeds less frequently. With Pageflakes, you now have the best of both. Click “Reader” in the top right corner of any of your pages and you’ll be taken to a RSS reader that looks very much like Bloglines or Google Reader (sometimes called an “Outlook” view because it has two or three panes like Outlook). All feeds from all of your Pageflakes pages are included. It isn’t as feature rich as Google Reader, but it’s close. And it’s fast. Posts can be viewed with or without the original site’s CSS included.
This means Pageflakes is making a play to become THE place users keep all of their RSS feeds, not just the few that are checked constantly.
Other New Features
There are additional features as well, although they will be overshadowed by the RSS reader. Most of these are new modules that can be added to the site, including a nice mashup module of Google Maps and local event data that shows you what’s going on in your location. There are also new modules for stock prices, MySpace profiles, a Hot Or Not viewer, and horoscopes.
Pageflakes is in a very crowded space dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. They have a larger startup competitor in Netvibes as well. But statistics show that once someone starts using a personalized home page they tend to stay there. Since the vast majority of Internet users don’t use any of these products yet, there is still a race to grab users. Whatever happens, it’s good for us consumers - competition is driving innovation. I’d like to see Google combine their IG and Reader products in a similar way, for example. Perhaps we’ll see that soon.
Wait a sec Mike, I thought you were an avid Netvibes user? But now I read you use Pageflakes and Greader too? No wonder you confirmed that you never sleep in the other post
Using web apps is kinda what I do for a living.
The reason I stopped using PageFlakes a long time ago was because it didn’t support my browser (Safari). And now with the beautiful new Google IG themes, I see little incentive to go back, even if support for Safari has been implemented.
Does the service aggregate multiple feeds into one display area, or do we need to click on each feed name to view its contents?
The ability to take the widgets and place them elsewhere is a good feature and the destiny of web applications.
I loved Pageflakes until it was simple. Now to look cool they show a picture from each top post of a blog which is super distracting when you are trying to read a list of headlines. I’m back to google reader since this stupid update.
-Zaid
I like pageflakes its going to be a sucsess !!!
I use Netvibes and am still waiting for the competition to give good reasons for using their services instead. I’m sure there must be some
Pageflakes look like the only viable alternative though. Google’s offering is bizarrely weak (for them). I thought they’d be competing with the Netvibes “ecosystem” by now, but the choice of widgets is still small.
@ Zaid - You can edit the widgets to only show headlines and not a thumbnail.
I agree with Smaran (#3). I’m primarily a Safari user, and NetVibes is absolutely mint.
It’s puzzling to me that a company like PageFlakes wouldn’t put more resources behind supporting a browser that is disproportionately prevalent amongst early adoptors. I know it’s still single digits amongst all browser installs, but I bet it’s greater than 10% amongst early adoptors.
I actually made the switch to NetVibes from MyYahoo after they launched their new beta. MyYahoo was becoming excruciatingly slow and in addition they didn’t have Safari support for their beta site.
No Safari = I use Netvibes, but I did just set up a pageflakes page for my girlfriend in Firefox. I don’t know which I prefer, but I like this inclusion of a more traditional RSS reader. For hardcore feed reading though, as far as I’ve seen so far, there’s no web based app that can handle the work that NetNewsWire can.
None the less, I’m stoked that SplashCast works with Pageflakes. Go Pageflakes!
the idea of - having - your own start page / and to have that product reach mass markets is tough - also when you have to compete with yahoo and Google.
- then again if you can hire away some people from each company; you might be able to know what they were planning and launch them before the others.
Nice review Mike. I agree that the latest Pageflakes release has some nice features. I’ve been using these guys for a couple of months now (used to be on Google IG) and have been happy with the direction they’re going.
@Smaran, Adam and other Safari users:
Thanks for visiting and for considering Pageflakes. We agree that Safari support is extrememly important, and you can expect to see that very, very soon. Check out our blog at http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Help/Blog.aspx, we’ll post soon about Safari support (Blog RSS: http://www.pageflakes.com/Comm.....x?Module=6)
I love Pageflakes for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the ability to easily share my collected content with others.
I share my collected Flickr photofeeds, blog posts, RSS feeds with my family and then also have started collecting feeds local to my community that is flavored by public pictures which I share with the public.
I have used all the big names in startpages and like what both Google and Yahoo have changed, but without being able to share it, just isolates me.
Pageflakes is great personalized home page. I believe in nearest future it will be riched by absolutely new functions, say, individual TV/mobile/RSS streams. Go on!
I tried Pageflakes and I didn’t like that the title of the story took me to the website instead of viewing the content within Pageflakes. Google IG does the same thing. It seems like from the new updates that this has changed.
I started using Google reader for a little bit due to heavy recommendations. I ended up going back to netvibes as I like the layout. This new feature with Pageflakes allowing different views of feeds sounds really useful and I’m sure we will see it soon in Netvibes.
After having less than great experiences with 3 other front page interfaces, I gave PageFlakes a try at the recommendation of a friend. I haven’t looked back. I love the interface, speed, and the customization. There are tons of cool features. I have two pages of widgets (flakes) that I actually use. The first is all of my tools, the second page is mainly my news and special interest feeds.
The RSS Reader seems to be very good one for Journalists. The “Save article” feature is pretty cool. I used to mark items as browser favorite before. But being able to actually save them inside the reader and forward it to my colleagues and editor is a real time saver. I must say there’s no other better tool for Journalist right now.
I still dont get why people need this personalized pages which take a ton of time to load. For me i am like my default firefox start page.
BTB, i saw a adsense ad in techcrunch for a start page service (forgot the name) with a sensational headline like “Web 2.0 Sucks?” or something. Thats smart advertising!
PageFlakes has a major strategy issue — they’re focusing on portals as a technology, not media outlets. No one thinks to themselves, “Hey, I wonder where I can upgrade my portal experience?!” They think, “I need a place that will hold my portfolio tickers, give me news related to my job and sports updates on my favorite teams.” Which is exactly why My Yahoo! has done so well. Maybe PF is being coy and just haven’t released a next gen iteration that is more focused on demographic plays, but I don’t think that marketing portal technology is the brightest idea in this market. MySpace demonstrated that consumer-facing technology is not a crucial differentiator.
That’ll be $100K for strategic consulting, thank you very much.
Pageflakes really reduces the amount of stress on my fingertips. I can’t wait for ubiquitous voice-data convergence to really be effective.
I’m still waiting for these companies to monetize. I don’t really see how they are going to do this.
>> I’m still waiting for these companies to monetize
You think being the gateway to web is not monetizable?. There are several ways to monetize, Search comes first to my mind!. Remember how firfox makes 50 million/year or so with its google partnered startpage.
The problem with startpages is not monetizing but rather marketing. They dont have a viral element like social sites so they have to market to one person at a time. They can do deals with OEM’s like dell but it will be very very expensive.
Thanks for the pageflakes review, I have become an avid user and have already started using the new features and love them. I was curious did they hint at other new things to come?
Wow, I made a psot…I’m now 2.0
This RSS reader is way too simple… you can’t even mark all feeds read… they should copy the newsgator.com rss reader, I will definitely stick to that.
who do you think is more edgier netvibes or pageflakes. i think the vote goes
to pageflakes
@Peter: In the bottom left of the RSS Reader, there’s a “mark all read” dropdown.
I went to PageFlakes a few months back and am glad I did. My home page is now exactly how I like it. PF also has some cool flakes to play around with in their gallery. It’s worth checking out.
My favorite flake, “quote of the day. ” Also managed to keep up with some of favorite blogs through the RSS reader. Pageflakes is simple and nicely designed, great for users like myself.
I use Pageflakes RSS reader in Newspaper view. This feature is great to review all the feed at once.
pageflakes should use its beautiful RSS reader as its default feed reader. its really disturbing for me to go to the website for reading articles. its always more convenient to stay inside the site where i organize everything. if you haven’t seen the RSS reader yet, i think u’ll like it. just chnge the default viewer to RSS reader from the widget settings.
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THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE BIGGEST PAGEFLAKES SPAM POSTERS THREAD EVER… give it up already you posers.
PageFlakes make my life easier. Can’t live without it. I’m glad more people will know about it now.
Check out http://www.iyoype.com they launched beta last week and makes reading RSS real easy. It is still in its early stages but the site looks promising.
I just checked out the iyoype site, it has one main advantage, it lets you stay within the same location as you check out similar results. Not quite sure what the Documents section is all about or how it relates to Google.
Yes iyoype lets you stay in context for RSS or bookmarks that you can also import from your browser and it requires no downloads. Documents is mashup with Googledocs that makes all your documents available (in case u use GD) while surfing any site so that you can go back to your spreadsheets (only works for ss)
Sometimes new “features” are annoying (thumbnails on rss widgets–glad to hear I can change that). I haven’t tried the RSS feeder, but seems like it will be an eye-saver. I love scanning new articles for my feeds, but sheesh, someday I’m gonna go blind.
I’ve been using pageflakes for the last several months. It’s faster than netvibes and more sophisticated than google IG. I haven’t logged on today but I hope these new changes don’t slow things down.
As for the complaints by Zaid (#5) & Yosef (#16), the things which you don’t like are all changeable by using the edit option on each feed.
#34: You’re an idiot.
it looks quite cool but its just a more jazzy version of google’s or yahoo’s personalized page.
Pageflakes and Netvibes: it is so ON.
I don’t see how they can compete with netvibes.