Personalized desktop pages have been a popular as various players have grown market share, and others have failed. Providers like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and iGoogle have a passionate user base - nearly 40 million people a month visit My Yahoo alone (Comscore worldwide, January 2008). So many of these popped up by the end of 2005 that we stopped paying attention.
As is often the case though, when an idea becomes popular enough, the barrier to entry often decreases as at first people try to design their own versions, then later you can buy a script that does the same thing. This auction on Sitepoint is offering an “Ajax DeskTop StartPage Enterprise website (like PageFlakes, Netvibes & iGoogle! )” with a starting price of $90. You can test the service youself at Mevou.com.
So what does $90 buy? It’s not as polished as the existing players, but it’s usable. Customizable widgets are offered next to theme and wallpaper support and page customization options. Except for a lack of depth in the widget offering, the experience in using this script wasn’t that much different from similar sites.
I’m not qualified to say that $90 is cheap for the script (it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be found elsewhere for less) but one thing is certain: here comes the personalized desktop page clone army.
If FLOSS: $0
Point being: do you support free software and/or open source software?…
the Ext JS framework (which is free) have web desktop examples.
http://extjs.com/
(Disclaimer: no involvenment, just as a user - I really like its coding style)
a friend of mine coded similar app in one day only.
see the demo at http://www.olmazmi.com
so its not a big deal.
What you’re failing to understand is that these are reasonably trivial to code; I know several academics who have their students creating personal web-tops using various frameworks at the moment, and it is easy. The three services you mentioned have value firstly for the massive amount of users they have, and secondly the ecosystem of widgets and services they have tied in. The core idea of drag and droppable iframes and rss feeds is not interesting. Also; attempt at LOLowl in the feed? FAIL.
Another personalized desktop website to consider is Odysen at http://www.odysen.com. A couple of the main differences include free-formatting widgets and integrating more than one feed in a news widget.
Duncan, this is not new, you can buy scripts similar to whatever service you are thinking of: auctions, shops, search engines,youtube,digg etc…
So for a few bucks (or free in most cases) theoretically you can build yourself an Amazon, Ebay or Youtube clone….
Other issues that define success like scalability,support or marketing are not included in the price
Or rather, it’s usually the brand, or brandability, or brand building, that really counts, and much less the software availability… vivid example being the free wordpress, and the success of techcrunch (and the failure of the countless others techcrunch wannabes…)
Funny how the Alstrasoft demo, priced at $399, points to the same demo as the sitepoint auction demo, priced $90.
Anyone actually know what they are getting.
We’ve built a Java app that does this and will hopefully be the first on the iPhone. Any feature requests?
James
from
FaceySpacey.com, Your One Stop Social Media Shop
How much does it cost to get my sitepoint and ebay auctions listed on TechCrunch?
bidding is fair
http://www. i-guide .ro
Ever heard of Hotscripts.com ???
There are sub $100 scripts that emulate every single website. Even Techcrunch is just a GPL script. It’s called wordpress. What do you think programmers in developing nations do for work?
This guy is just selling the code he bought from AlstraSoft, who are the ones who run Mevou.com (and which is the reason the guy isn’t selling mevou.com as well).
StartupNorth.ca - The Life and Death of Canadian Startups
StartupNorth.ca — spreads across the page too wide - difficult to read, just a feedback for your ref.
These are not new and they won’t affect netvibes and pageflakes…
What will affect netvibes and pageflakes : when someone comes up with white label option with nothing less..
this isn’t worthy of techcrunch
@14 confirmed
http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/71559.html
Looks like a $399 script
As always, it’s all about the people, not the software. I think TC loses sight of that way too often. Remember the entire crunch family is just a set of Wordpress installs with some custom templates.
“this isn’t worthy of techcrunch”
It just shows that bloggers rarely research before hitting the submit button. That’s the difference between print journalism and online journalism. This was a very human thing to happen to this type of media. Had he Google’d it quickly first, or checked hotscripts, this wouldn’t have happened.
We live in an “instant” world today where we expect everything to be obvious and easy, and this is just a byproduct. Scoble is famous for doing this. He comes back with the “i was wrong” post following and tries to get even more traffic for saying he was sorry than for the original mess up post.
Hey Duncan….
Just discovered this site called taadaam.com that allows you to customize the google header title.
Not quit the same as a personalized desktop page, but you can adjust it to your igoogle page…..
cheers
after all, the quality (of the mevou site’s script) seems marginal; the major issue — why requiring the user to horizontal-scroll on a 1024×768 screen??
Free and tweakable
http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/sc.....boxes.html
@22,
this is my fav from dhtmlgoodies.com
http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/sc.....-tree.html
I used this in a customer project, and it worked super well.
@23,
ok but confusing — try right-click-and-hold(ie.,don’t-release-button) on the yellow folder or the folder text… then you’ll know what i mean..
@24 -
i mean, [left]click-&-hold (though right-click-&-hold even more confusing)…
Funny, I’ve been writing my own RSS reader this weekend. Netvibes Ginger is going to be extremely resource-intensive, so I’ve decided to strike out and build my own. So many sites have delusions of grandeur that it’s nigh-on impossible to find something that Just Works(tm).
iGoogle is so buggy. Try to add a widget…it won’t. Try to delete it? It won’t. Change themes? Forget it.
At least My Yahoo! works.
dargearigniparguaibpoeiargboeargaerg
This guy is selling a illegal version of Alstrasoft script, i dont get how this is news?
>This guy is selling a illegal version of Alstrasoft script, i dont get how this is news?
That’s the art side of techcrunch.
What about http://www.dropthings.com/? It’s an open source version of Pageflakes (kinda). It was developed by the CTO and co-founder of Pageflakes for a book he wrote. Why pay for something inferior?
Holy crap! its so much like netvibes
Soon enough all major portals will be customizable. Think my.yahoo.com, my.cnn.com, my.nobosh.com, my.####.com.
Very similar to netvibes. $90 good value tho?
The auction was ended early at $200. Who knows what the buyer actually got. The seller says it’s not Alstrasoft’s script, but the description and sample site are lifted from Alstrasoft. There was no demo of the supposed clone the seller wrote.
It’s not the price…you can have given eBay, Amazon, and Google away in the late 90s for free to someone, or a group of someones - but it’d have bombed
it’s the people, and money behind it - that can make something grow
Much better than netvibes or the others, this start page is quick and gets you where you need to go. Join the 2,000 daily users:
http://www.qcrunch.com
I sell Netvibes PHP script. $75. 100% money-back guarantee from PHPhilippines Software Development Ltd. located in Quezon City, Luzon, Philippines and in operation on the internets since 2000.
@38, southpark can teach us so much about ourselves:
http://www.southparkstuff.com/.....415script/
Howard Stern: Now, some people that all you guys do is perform sick and disgusting acts for shock value and money, which makes you whores. But I’d like to prove them wrong. So what I’m gonna do… is I’m gonna offer each of you $50,000 to write a netvibes clone script with a lime green tangent of facebook functionality for me right now.
Tom Green: I’m in.
Johnny Knoxville: Me too.
Kenny: (And me!)
Howard Stern: Oh.
Tom Green: Fine! I’ll do it for 40!
Johnny Knoxville: 30.
Tom Green: [points at Johnny] 20!
Kenny: (…Ten bucks!)
Howard Stern: Ooh, the kid says he’ll do it for ten bucks.
Tom Green: Damnit. I’m out.
Johnny Knoxville: Me too. I guess he is the biggest whore.
I programmed a Javascript windowing system once just for fun. There’s nothing really hard about it, although for someone who can’t code and just wants a pre-made solution $90 sounds like a pretty good deal, assuming they can flesh out the site and make it into a usable service themselves.
Duncan:
Now that you have revealed that the “secret to success” in creating a personalized homepage product is purchasing a web site for $90, there may in fact be an army of personalized page clones forthcoming (there were in 2005 - where are they now?). In fact, I’ll do you one better. As an exclusive for TechCrunch readers, I’ll let you know that our cofounder and CTO Omar published a book on how to develop an AJAX personalized portal, compete with source code, and it’s available on Amazon for $29.69 (http://www.amazon.com/Building-Web-2-0-Portal-ASP-NET/dp/0596510500).
I just saved each member of the forthcoming army of our competitors $60.31!
I agree with you that on the surface, anyone can make a functioning drag-and-drop AJAX portal demo site where an experienced tech user can drag-and-drop RSS feeds and place widgets. However, as my colleagues at Pageflakes and my former coworkers at iGoogle or My Yahoo can tell you, it takes, shall we say, just a tad more than $90 and hell of a lot of smart, talented people, investment and hard work to bring a successful product like Pageflakes to the international mass market. To suggest otherwise is not only very disappointing to them, but it may be extremely dangerous to someone taking your suggestion to the contrary at face value.
Our community of users, Pagecasters, and private groups sharing and creating Flakes and Pagecasts already know this (www.pageflakes.com/community/). In my years working in this product category, I can tell you that among many other things, we need to address challenging issues in usability, personalization, internationalization, privacy, editorial and community moderation, as well as in building a massively complex infrastructure that will scale and reliably store user’s pages and permit publishing, sharing and social features.
Don’t believe me? Buy Omar’s book - and good luck!
LOL on the blog , check this site http://www.Wireseek.com Ads integration Sweet A lot visiters
re 41 - hah, great comment ;-))
It’s article like this that remind me why I read Mashable instead of TechCrunch.
I think I came across a search engine script somewhere. Does that mean I can beat Google now?
Duncan: You should have done some research.
P.S.: Next time I am selling a Pligg powered Digg-clone at DigitalPoint, I’ll mail you. Please techcrunch it.
Just one more to add to the endless list of freeware open source personalized desktop pages: http://sourceforge.net/projects/posh/
thanks Martin! http://www.taadaam.com totally rocks
What the buyer (me) ‘actually got’: http://www.me.cx
Might not resolve yet as I’ve only just uploaded, but I’ve got some cool plans for site (including option to put ads or use search engine on for revenue share - which will always remain optional).
Create your own homepages and test it out. Pretty nifty:)
i am glad you posted this. its interesting to see the varying prices to get stuff coded. I bet that if I went to a design shop they would have started the bidding at 10k or so.
Dan, cool to see you stop by and defend your product.