Lately, it seems as if the personalized home page space has been exploding after a year or so of dormancy. The last real action I recall was when My Yahoo relaunched with a beefed-up interface and full RSS feed compatibility.
In the past few months, we've seen a trickle of new offerings, from the promising MSN Start.com to the not-so-impressive Google offering. That trickle has rapidly become a flood, with the recent debuts of two impressive newcomers.
The latest are Netvibes and Protopage, both of which offer next-gen functionality using Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a combination of technologies driving Web 2.0.
Netvibes is Start.com done right. The functionality is very similar: add and manage RSS web feeds without reloading the browser; drag and drop content modules; built-in modules for weather and web search; read web feeds natively inside the interface without leaving the page.
The big differences between Netvibes and Start.com? Netvibes integrates with Gmail, and the interface at Netvibes is far more slicker. So, advantage: Netvibes. We'll keep watching this one to see if it indeed warrants being your home page.
Protopage is a bit of a different animal. It has a much more flexible interface where the color scheme and background styles are totally customizable. But, while it is promising, its Achilles' heel is its lack of RSS feed integration. Its developers promise feeds in the next iteration, and when that happens, Protopage could likely take the lead in this emerging area.
Methinks Yahoo has some serious work to do if it wants to be the page that is returned when I click that "Home" icon.
Posted by Cory Kleinschmidt
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