Review of Netvibes and Pageflakes
Posted by IronMac on 28th February 2007
It has come to my attention that I have begun to suffer from information overload or, more specifically, my browser (Firefox) has. It currently has about 5 windows open with an average of about 10 tabs in each window. I know, I should use bookmarks but I don’t. Tabbed browsing has spoiled me by allowing me to flit between websites with the click of a mouse. It’s especially great for online forums where I don’t have to constantly relog in.
The consequence of this has been that Firefox is running like a two-legged dog. I’ve heard that customizable webpages that aggregate sources of information and applications into one website may help with information overload. So, a quick scan of the landscape has shown up four possible candidates. (There may be more but I am just one man.)
I’ve decided to do a bit of a review on all four of these to see which one will I be using most often and which may help some of you too. I’ve decided to grade them on ease of use, ease of setup, and how useful they are in terms of the number of offerings and comprehensiveness of said offerings.
Admittedly, all three are subjective but, hey, it’s better than nothing. So, let’s start.
I am going to bestow the generic term of “start pages” for the review on all four offerings while recognizing that each service has their own unique term. So, I may refer to “start page” or the more service-specific term depending on the circumstances.
Yahoo!’s My Yahoo is probably the granddaddy of all these services. Yahoo! was one of the first search engines and one of the first to offer portals where information and services were brought together for websurfers. All of the services that we are going to look at today are evolutionary steps from those early portal days.
Note that only My Yahoo and Google’s homepage services require that you register but it’s best if you were to register for the other two services so that your settings are kept should the service go down, you shut down your computer or you access your start page from other machines.
My Yahoo is relatively easy to set up and use while being quick to customize with various offerings, services and in terms of its appearance. It’s relatively fast and everything looks neat and tidy.
Layout is limited in that My Yahoo determines where each offering/service goes, whether it goes in a smaller side column or in a larger column. It is certainly not as flexible as that of the other services.
I really can’t say too much about My Yahoo’s offerings but they seem as numerous and comprehensive as the competing services.
Where My Yahoo starts to annoy? First, there is a huge banner ad at the very top of the page along with several navigational buttons. They take up a good 25% of the My Yahoo page. I hate scrolling up and down because it just eats away at your time.
Second, and still on the theme of navigation, it is a bit confusing when trying to switch from My Yahoo to More Yahoo! for My Groups and then back. I’ve had instances of where I had no idea of how to get to where I want to go and ended up clicking like mad hither and thither.
Third, and probably more importantly, there is the issue of email. From what I can tell, My Yahoo limits you to your own Yahoo! email and no other email service is available. I could be very wrong about this but I haven’t found an option of where to get my Gmail or PO3/IMAP services.
So, My Yahoo! is pretty decent basic offering if you want to stay with Yahoo! and are willing to put up with some of the annoyances.
Google’s homepage offering is up next and this comes as part of the ever-growing package of services that you get when you sign up with their Gmail service. homepage is dead simple to set up because of the fact there is very little to set up in the first place.
There is no need to do any sort of layout because you’re limited to a three-column view, no background colour aside from the default white, and no themes aside from flat white. Populating your first homepage (and subsequent pages) with what are called “Gadgets” is very easy but it’s hard to see how many pages of Gadgets are available in each category or how they are ordered. For the latter, they could have been ordered chronologically or by popularity but certainly not alphabetically from what I can tell.
FYI at this point, every service’s “gadget” or “flake” is either developed in-house or through an outside developer. Be aware that not all of them work properly. In fact, the Google Maps “gadget” failed to find my location whereas Google Maps itself has no problems doing so and the module feed in Netvibes from Fortune magazine has been vainly loading itself for the past two days.
Access to email services is just slightly better than for My Yahoo and that”s because homepages offers Yahoo! email access. Yep, go figure.
I had expected a bit more from Google’s homepages service and that was one of the reasons why I had chosen to review it after My Yahoo. I have to admit that it’s a bit of a disappointment.
Now, for the two services that are geared primarily to the concept of start pages.
First up is Netvibes. When you first encounter this service it’s a bit overwhelming because of how many choices there are available. Netvibes and Pageflakes are a real leap up from Google’s homepage offering. A good analogy would be Model T versus Mercedes-Benz’s 7-series.
There are not only the default choices (called “modules”) given to you in a collapsible side-bar but also additional modules, RSS feeds, Podcasts, Events, and Tabs that you can use to customize your information addiction in what are not called “pages” but “Tabs”. You can spend a lot of time laying out your Tab(s) and populating them. The new Coriander theme release also allows you to resize your Tab’s columns at will.
The additional offerings mentioned above, such as modules, also come from Netvibes’ own users and outside developers. Users can review and comment on how useful each offering is and this is pretty important when you have thousands of offerings. Reviews are a bit sparse so that gives you an idea of how relatively young the Netvibes’ service is.
In fact, almost everything is customizable; from the colours to the layout to country preferences and so on. Speaking of country preferences, Netvibes has a more international feel to it than Pageflakes, its closest competitor. It’s hard to describe but it’s there in how it was immediately able to pick up that I am in Canada rather than Pageflakes which thinks I am an American.
And the access to email services is leaps and bounds above that of all three competing services because not only does it include access to various webmail offerings and POP3 but also IMAP! You can do away with a separate email client if you feel like it.
Netvibes has almost everything that an information junkie could want in an easy-to-use and customizable package. It would be my first choice for a start page if its modules were a bit more polished and if the service wasn’t so slow. I know that some of the slowness that I’ve seen comes from the various services behind each module but it can be excruciatingly slow at times.
And, finally, there is Pageflakes. One of the reasons I am reviewing this last is because Dan Cohen, the CEO, was actually in charge of Yahoo!’s My Yahoo offering until he jumped shipped about a month ago. Sort of a closed-circle thing happening here.
Pageflakes is very similar to Netvibes. They both allow you to easily customize your start page (My Page in Pageflakes’s parlance) in terms of colours, layout, and “flakes”. There is a community of users who, like Netvibes, submit in their own flakes, feeds, podcasts and templates. Templates can be very interesting in that if you and someone else have the exact same interests it can be a shortcut in sharing a Page and the information contained therein. And, the number of flakes/feeds is expected to grow significantly over the next month or so according to Cohen in a recent article.
Where I suspect that Pageflakes stands ahead of Netvibes is in the maturity and polish of its flakes. For example, its Notepad application is jaw-droppingly incredible! It allows you to compose, edit and then save notes on Pageflakes’ own servers. And the speed of Pageflakes seems to be faster than that of Netvibes.
So, which one of the four to go with? Pageflakes and Netvibes would be my first choices but it’s very hard to choose between these two though. Pageflakes seems to be a slightly more mature product but it’s a dead heat between them and both are just getting out of the gate with their services.
I’m tempted to go with both of them but that certainly won’t help me in reducing the number of Firefox windows and tabs will it?
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