Itchy Hands

Overview: Personalised Homepages

The first homepage I created had links to my email account, a Google search box and links to my favourite websites, besides all the crap about myself. It was my very own personal portal to the Web. That homepage of mine isn’t up anymore so I can’t show you an example, but John Dvorak (he gets no spam) has got an excellent “personal homepage (Dvorak’s Universal Homepage and Personal Portal 2005)”:http://www.dvorak.org/home.htm which he has set up.

Evidently, many people think a custom portal is a great idea. The Web is so vast and wide that it’s nice to have your favourite sites and services all in a handy page. Unfortunately, unless you’re a bit of a geek it’s not so easy to put together your own personalised homepage. But lately we’ve seen a slew of new services which makes putting together your own custom homepage as easy as dragging and dropping.

“Google Personalized Homepage”:http://www.google.com/ig, “Windows Live”:http://www.live.com, “Protopage”:http://www.protopage.com (”mentioned previously”:http://www.itchyhands.com/2005/09/24/protopage-ajax-personal-bookmarks-springboard), “Netvibes”:http://www.netvibes.com, “Goowy”:http://www.goowy.com, “Zoozio”:http://www.zoozio.com, “Pageflakes”:http://www.pageflakes.com.. it seems there’s a new one popping up every week. They call themselves different things, but they provide the same functionality. Here’s a quick overview on some of my favourites.

h3. “Protopage”:http://www.protopage.com

“Mentioned before”:http://www.itchyhands.com/2005/09/24/protopage-ajax-personal-bookmarks-springboard on Itchy Hands, Protopage are one of the earliest personalised homepages. They recently launched version 2 of their service, which now includes RSS feeds and a feed directory, and rich text editing. Other upcoming features include an auto-arrange feature (more on this later) and easy photo uploads. Its developers also mentioned in their “interview with Amber McArthur”:http://thisweekintech.com/itn4 that they would also integrate with Gmail too. Way cool! It also loads really fast.

Protopage is one of the few personalised homepages which is completely freeform and doesn’t confine your panel sizes to grids and columns. However it could get messy, so auto-arrange would be a great feature. Protopage is definitely one of my favourites.

h3. “Netvibes”:http://www.netvibes.com

Netvibes is another of my favourites. It features a cool drag-and-drop interface for you to arrange your panels and has many modules which you can add to your Netvibes page. The Gmail module lets you see any unread messages in your Gmail account, and the Writely module shows you your current documents. Another of my favourite modules is the bookmarks modules where you can organise your bookmarks with tags. Their RSS feed reader is really great too, and is a great way to read my “Dilbert”:http://www.dilbert.com comics. More features are coming soon as they are only in beta, but one problem is that Netvives takes a while to load.

h3. “Google personalized homepage”:http://www.google.com/ig and “Windows Live”:http://www.live.com

I’m grouping these two because they’re similar in a lot of ways. Both look rather the same, with the same drag-and-drop functionality that Netvibes has. Both has also got a big search bar at the top of the page. Both also have a sidebar which can open to reveal some default RSS feeds and content. One difference – I think Windows Live isn’t fully compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer. Bleh…

They’re a lot like Netvibes, but the main advantage of Google’s personalized homepage and Windows Live is that you can add third-party add-ons that does lots of other things. You can find more modules for Google at the “directory”:http://www.google.com/ig/directory or “Google Modules website”:http://www.googlemodules.com and ‘gadgets’ at the “Microsoft Gadgets website”:http://www.google.com/ig/directory. This may prove to be a better strategy because independent developers can help add more functionality to these personalised homepages.

h3. “Goowy”:http://www.goowy.com

The last one I want to talk about is Goowy. I think the name is a play on the acronym GUI(Graphical User Interface), pronounced Goowy. Unlike the others I’ve mentioned, Goowy uses Flash instead of “AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX for its interface. Another big difference is that it doesn’t just give you the customisable homepage, they give you a whole office suite and more!

Goowy offers a 2GB email account, a calendar function, contacts, search, RSS reader with del.icio.us integration, and even cute Flash games. In actual fact, Goowy isn’t very much like the others because you can’t really create links and bookmarks to your favourite sites (or maybe its not the main feature and I missed it). Instead, it’s like a Web desktop you can access from any computer. But it’s really cool, so I thought I’d just give it a mention.

So that rounds up my overview on personalised homepages. They’re definitely much, much cooler than the one I made back in 1999. That’s so last century, but these new services mentioned above, they’re the future. As usual comments are appreciated. Go play with some of them and let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2005 at 1:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.