If Netvibes is getting old and you’re tired of looking at your desktop to find all your favorite apps, Schmedley might be a worthwhile alternative.
Leading up to its public beta next week, Schmedley is offering 5,000 private beta invites for TechCrunch readers who want to take the site for a spin. The premise is simple: you sign up and get brought to your start page, which can be littered with well-designed widgets that let you search Google and Yahoo at the same time, check up on your Twitter feed, work with Facebook, check your stocks, and much more, without surfing to the respective sites.
Schmedley offers a full range of widgets to add to your page and each can be expanded or removed with a click of the mouse. The design is quite appealing and the general uniformity of the widget designs improves the experience, but considering the popularity of Netvibes, it’ll be interesting to see how Schmedley can compete.
If you want to try Schmedley out, click here. If not, you won’t have to wait long before its public beta: it starts on October 1.
See all
Post
This is great - we have a firewall against downloads at work so I’m always looking for a useful web app that can manage feesd. It could save alot of time - i’ll have to play with it more later.
I wonder how fast my start page would load with schmedley. The fast load time on iGoogle keeps me coming back.
Pretty tough competition which offers a lot more features…
PageFlakes is fantastic (in my opinion the best start page mouse trap) and a market leader — yet what did they sell for? Peanuts. The evidence so far is this is not a good space to make money.
it looks nice but very few of the widgets seem to, um, work well.
The start page market is ripe for additional innovation. Done right, they are tremendous productivity tools.
For a new take on a start page that I call a Mashable Webtop, take Qrowd for a spin at http://www.qrowd.com
Robert Yeager
http://www.qrowd.com
http://www.cooqy.com
Looks nice, I agree. Two things - 1) if they already poking into my e-mail, might as well let me send it too, 2) let me resize that damn widget!
Why “get brought to your start page” is linking to netvibes article?
After extensively experimenting with Pageflakes, Netvibes, and iGoogle, I used Netvibes for about a year. The most used part by far were the feeds, and I liked the targeted pages you could add with zero effort (e.g. I added the World Cup focused page when that was going on).
After I discovered Google Reader, and realized that Netvibes was taking ages to load the many feeds and widgets I had, I never went back to any start page. Even the speed of iGoogle wasn’t a saving grace, though I like the header pictures
Finally, with the option to start your browser with tabs from the previous session, start pages just don’t do it for me. I guess I just don’t have enough use for the multitude of available widgets.
thank you for the invite!
It’s ProtoPage but with adverts!
As for the ‘launcher’ at the bottom - try RocketDock.
This was really cool. I used some features in beta for some time but certainly it stopped working , even it was saying password incorrect after reset.
I enjoyed some features of it more than in netvibes.
I’m not comfortable sharing my passwords for twitter, gmail, etc on an external site. So this concept does not work for me…
It’s nice, but useless.
The Gmail and Facebook widgets, for example, offer very limited functions, so to reply to a mail you have to close Schmedley, go to http://www.gmail.com and authenticate again.
The other tools (calendar, notes), are just nice toys.
What functionality would make you come back and use it all the time??
Taking the Gmail widget, for example, it lacks the most obvious features about one’s webmail account (reply, compose).
For me the problem is with the concept. If Schmedley is supposed to be a webtop, a web based replacement of a desktop, it’s quite useless: it just adds one or more steps to perform common tasks related to web navigation.
The integration with Meebo is better, but what’s the point of “logging into Schmedley and opening a new tab with Meebo” VS. just “opening a Firefox tab and entering in Meebo” without passing through the Schmedley authentication?
Search - who really needs to display Yahoo and Google searches together?
RSS - this is ok and useful.
The best part of course is the UI, nice and very user friendly. The idea of partitioning screen space with internal tabs is great, but you should not enter in a visual competition against the browser’s tabs.
I think that when you use it for the first time, the risk is that you start exploring most familiar tools like Facebook, Gmail, Calendar, and the first feeling is that you don’t need a widgetized feature-less version of those everyday services.
But again I miss the concept. You want to aggregate external services? If so, plan a better integration (provided it’s technically possible). You want to aggregate contents? In this case, get rid of all the OS-like toys and give the user a choice, a wizard, a kind of template, a focus on a particular aspect. The desktop-like UI is nice as I said, but it’s “empty” in all senses when you approach it.
The answer is: “why should I put Schmedley between me and the web?”. Consider how well these days browsers like IE Opera Chrome Firefox enable users to keep organized and productive their web experience.
would be nice if you could “log in” to the myspace widget so you could view private profiles. most everyone has private profiles these days.
other than that, i love schmedley and i’m using it as my start page for now
ATUNN start page without invites !!!
http://www.atunn.com/test
Well , the public beta started yesterday if i am correct since i tried for an invite and they did sent me an invite by the end of the day. Its got a nice interface - a smoothed-up-site which gives it an uber look ;). Could include a search in the youtube widget .
Atunn.com is better!!!! bye. Frank
Looks cool - but I do not think it can beat MySurfPad.com in the startpage arena http://www.mysurfpad.com