Using a personalized homepage as an information hub: 14 options for you
Remember Web 1.0? All the battles to get you to make one site or another your start/homepage for when you started your browser? The major players of the time were all fighting to get your eyeballs on their ads. Tons of time and money was spent trying to add features and tools to draw you in and keep you coming back. Then the bubble burst and we all realized that some of these start pages were pretty useless and switched to Google as a start page.
We flash forward to now with AJAX and the new Web 2.0 technologies. The battle for the startpage is back. At least now they are cooler, faster, and have more tools than you could imagine (or even use). Mashable did a review/shootout of the top 14 services and some of them I hadn’t even heard of:
Ultimately, there’s no “best” startpage. Netvibes and Pageflakes are not short on content, and offer amazing customization. iGoogle and My Yahoo are great options if you already use those services. Schmedley and yourminis approach the market uniquely, and some people swear by them.
We would avoid the smaller, less featureless sites, however, especially those that lack a developer community: these are the most likely to fall into disrepair, forcing you to move house just as you get settled in. Source: 14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature
Can one of these pages become your daily info center? Are you the kind of person who launches a nice, clean, and empty browser window first thing in the morning? If you start your day opening e-mail and then launching a browser, yeah this could be cool for you. I, on the other hand, rarely have a “fresh browser”. It’s always a few tabs from here or there. I live in my RSS reader and e-mail.
I’ve tried a bunch and don’t go back to one to refresh that kind of multifaceted thing … okay that might change with Zude. But more on that later.
Do you use a personalized homepage? If so which one?
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POSTED IN: Cool tools, Internet tips
2 opinions for Using a personalized homepage as an information hub: 14 options for you
Pragati
Jul 4, 2020 at 11:32 am
I had actually checked out Netvibes sometime back and it looks pretty cool. Somehow, I ended up using iGoogle because I already have an account with Google. It really works great. I have put stuff relating to news, jokes, quotes..etc. That being said, I find myself reading my feeds and emails more often.
Kevin
Jul 4, 2020 at 1:46 pm
No doubt, Pageflakes is the clear leader of the new start page startups. They have more content and more features than anyone else… and their site loads much faster than others too.
Kevin
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