Personalized desktop startup Pageflakes has long offered collaborative desktop sharing, allowing users to share pages within a private group, edited by multiple people, or published to the world. From Wednesday the service gets a new name specific to group pages: Pagecasts, which the company describes as “the intersection of personalized pages with social media”.
Pagecasts launch with impressive numbers, over 100,000 Pagecasts will be available in the Pageflakes Pagecast directory. The new name cames with an upgrade to Pageflakes’ search functionailty. Stronger indexing tools will provide improved access to publicly available group pages.
Users can use Pagecasts to easily and quickly mashup a multimedia page with interactive Flakes (widgets) that enable them to interact with others.
Real world uses for the service are broad. Existing uses include teachers educating students, families reaching out across the globe, political opinions being voiced, fans expressing their love for their favorite teams and celebrities, small business owners reaching new customers, professionals exchanging ideas, and even children being adopted from Africa.
Scheduled for June, Pageflakes next release will see new customization tools that include advanced theming.
Discloure: Pageflakes is a TechCrunch sponsor
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I have to say, the only thing that interested me about all this is the advanced themes. I wonder how they are going to pull off those rather nifty-looking, wonky push-pin tabs without it being some kind of gd_library-generated processor hog.
Web 1.0 the static web, Web 2.0 the collaborative web, Web 3.0 the widget web. Pageflakes is exactly the type of site that is going to ring in the next wave of innovation in social media. Companies are starting to say that the best they can do for an end user who is increasingly hard to please is provide tools.
Pageflakes is an amazing testament to this. This new service looks like a socially networked version of netvibes, and honestly that is probably what most web sites will begin to resemble as the internet evolves.
Pick a theme, design some tools, and give the user the control to organize it as he/she will.
this will go over well with that crowd that likes their start pages to take 30 seconds to load instead of 20.
please people! prefetch, precache, give me static html
every one of the dynamic page services should offer a “freeze this” feature to produce a static or semi-static version of the page
i basically wrote something like this in haskell myself and run it as a cronjob, i got so tired of waiting for these pages to load
if i am going to set a page as my “home page”, it has to load in less than one second
Pageflakes founders shouldn’t get early VC money.
Anyone can make startup page by using microsoft frontpage, download CSS examples, and open free webhosting site. Most of school and colleges taught student how to make the first webpage. Today, we have iGoogle, My yahoo, MSN startup page.
Pageflakes took much risk…
We got existing product. I don’t understand… Why this huge risk?
I thinks you should watch great startup.com documentary
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
It’s about rise and fall of the govWorks.com. Don’t say it will not happen to you.
You have to tell us what is innovation & web 2.0 behind pageflakes besides AJAX and NET technology. You need to show us what you invent that change the world.
1.) There is nothing new. It’s all fancy graphics.
2.) Mashup & RSS. What about it?
3.) With million dollar. Do you have innovation?
Perhaps Pageflakes should stop lifting code from Netvibes. This sounds a lot like Netvibes Ecosystem and Universe features. In NV Ecosystem you can publicly share tabs with collected feeds usually fitting some theme (News tab featuring BBC NPR NY Times Reuters Washington Post etc.) Universe feature suggests content based preexisting modules (widgets) and will allow you to browse user’s start pages with similar preferences etc.
Another eye-candy alternative to Pageflakes is Protopage http://www.protopage.com
@ #6 John:
I’ve been a Pageflakes user for a long time. As Mike points out, Pageflakes has “long offered” public and group pages for a long time - they basically invented the shared personalized page.
Doing some research here, it looks like the “Netvibes Universes” you mention was just announced a few weeks ago at Web 2.0 conference. What I see in Netvibes is about 100 or so read-only example pages that they apparently created themselves for things like Forbes, USA Today, 50 Cent, and generic media stuff like that. From what I can see, Netvibes hasn’t even shipped the feature for users to publish their own pages. Going well beyond publishing a page, us Pageflakes users can collaborate and jointly edit our pages with others, publish a page among a private group, etc. - not just put up a “MySpace” clone on the web.
In the meantime, Pageflakes users have created and shared 100,000+ pages about real things that are important to them and their families. Frankly, I think this is an impressive milestone and Pageflakes is leading the way. Check out the examples in Mike’s article, I see schools, child adoptions, etc.
Now that we have a counterpoint on “who did what first,” let’s put aside these feature discussions for a moment. As history has proven time and time again, it isn’t about the technology, VC funding, AJAX, mashups, web 2.0, whatever. The bottom line is that a lot of people like me have found Pageflakes and love it. We really find the “Pagecasting”stuff very fun and useful, and we don’t really care what’s under the hood or who made what feature first. I’ll bet that the 100,000 regular people that decided to share their creations with others don’t give a damn either.
I honestly don’t care about what people call it - Web1.0, Web2.0… I also don’t care who invented the wheel first. I am sure Amazon wasn’t the first book shop online either and there must have been other auction sites than eBay. What I do care about is that Pageflakes makes it possible for me to setup a page with a few mouse-clicks and then share it with my friends or publish it. Check my page if you want: http://www.pageflakes.com/juergen.anke/10086693
I tried the same with iGoogle and Live.com but they don’t have those features. I also chceked out Netvibes when they announced their universes but after finding out that I can’t publish my page there either (what’s the value of a universe if it’s limited to a USAToday page setup by Netvibes? I can add those feeds myself…), I decided that Pageflakes is still the best choice. After all they had that feature for months now… not really sure why it’s announced only now. Well, maybe the 100,000 public pages was a nice milestone. It sure shows that I am not the only one with a public page
Regards from Dresden
Juergen
Still no Safari support on Mac OS X. Is that on Pageflakes Todo-list?
As you could see in statistics released some time ago, Apple (and in consequence Safari) is getting more and more sales.
I am waiting for the advance customization feature. Once it comes, i’ll consider switching over from Netvibes.
I say this wouldn’t be covered - if Mike didnt get $10,000/mo per their ad on the right … :/
- This is little to No news …
#12 - little to no news? 100,00 public pages… advanced customization options, having introduced social features to personal start pages… yeah, i call that no news too.
#6 - lifting code? you might want to do a simple web search before you write stuff like that. pageflakes introduced public pages and other social features a long time before netvibes even announced their (limited) universe feature: http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar.....s_blur.php - i really wonder where you guys get your ideas from.
#4 and #5 - uhm… no comment. but it was funny, thanks.
#3 - pageflakes loads in 2-3 seconds on my browser (firefox 2).
#10 - yes, that’s a good point. i use a mac at work and i really wished they would support safari.
regards
suzie
I second Suzie. The really *huge* news here is that Pageflakes is the first to turn a previously passive/individual product (the portal) into an active/social phenomenom.
Hey…check out their blog, they say that part of the upcoming “Blizzard” release in June will be full Safari support. Mac users rejoice!!
http://www.pageflakes.com/Comm.....logPost=92
Pageflakes all the way. Being an avid Pageflakes fan, every 2nd week there is some thing new and exciting. And the wide array of features it offers, has Pageflakes as my home page.
I love the idea of pagecasting, both to the public at large but also select topics to select individuals. For instance, I am working wth a wireless company and have a whole page dedicated to wireless blogs, wireless news searches (us and competitors), project to-do lists, etc. that are shared with team members. It works great. I think everyone in marketing should use something like this to find and manage information.
The teacher/student functionality looks like a great way to share and learn.
Pagecasting is a sweet development in the growth of Pageflakes. Hope they keep up the innovation.
Introduced pagecasts to my blogger friend, he likes the ability to share and customize pages with his readers. Customers and owner may both contribute to the page, it’s a platform designed with users in mind. Out of which he derived a new business idea from using pagecasts, amazing tool. Good work by pageflakes.
Almost 2 yrs later, but it seems PageFlakes hasn’t caught on like I thought it would. Has anyone looked at their API? Is it hard to develop “flakes”. Seems like such a nice concept.