Comments on: Are all AJAX homepages doomed?

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:17:45 +0000

Wrong! designed correctly (for example protopage), ajax homepages can be an invaluable tool. my page http://www.protopage.com/mikeem50 contains all my fave feeds and tools (mindmapper, zoho notebook, omnidrive, twitter, gmail) one the one ajax page. a page in a page so to speak. real nice and useful.

By: Robert Eckert

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By: MAzu

MAzu — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:24:06 +0000

Hey, I’m a high user of netvibes. I’ve a long experience in the web industry, and I cannot live without Netvibes (this one is cool because it is really sober).
I can find my feeds on all the different places I’m working or living…and I’d rather a netvibes rss reader than a classic rss reader installed on all my computers.
Clearly, the BM needs to be find, but Netvibes is really useful for me in my work and everyday life to monitor the web.
As Bart, netvibes is my welcome page along other ones tabbed in my browser.

By: Jason Kolb

Jason Kolb — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:07:44 +0000

I wasn't able to find an AJAX homepage that did what I needed it to do--basically just read feeds quickly and easily. I took a look at the major ones, and not a-one could do it for me. I also have major concerns about security, or lack of it, from these companies, as not one has been able to give me a satisfactory answer about how they store say, my Gmail account password.

By: Bart

Bart — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 12:52:55 +0000

I use Netvibes all the time. I follow up multiple feeds from technews to personal feeds from friends. I also use the to-do list, the weather widget, the box.net storage widget and webnote to write something quickly down (when e.g. I receive a phonecall). I also pulled my Google Calendar feeds into Netvibes so I never forget an appointment or a friend’s birthday. I cannot imagine a world without Netvibes. I would miss it as hell! The Netvibes page is the first I visit when I open my browser.

By: Michael Mahemoff

Michael Mahemoff — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 01:35:15 +0000

These homepages also have a problem in that they don’t track behaviour as the user moves through the web, so can’t do anything so clever; they can only provide info users could get hold of fairly easily anyway.

The homepages that have the greatest chance of success are those where the server knows something about the user’s interests etc and can be adaptive, e.g. Google can create a much more useful homepage for people with Google toolbar installed.

By: Cesp

Cesp — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 20:27:56 +0000

The reason these home pages are failing is because they are home pages without a home. There really is no original content to offer. Pageflakes does not create content. It just repackages others. Same with netvibes and the rest. I think the author had the right idea, that these would be beneficial for a major content company, but one hasn’t really produced one…yet.

Stay tuned on that one. ;)

By: Flux Amm

Flux Amm — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:09:55 +0000

I really miss fold.com because it offered the most elegant way of putting web pages in auto-updating HTML containers, a bit like sidebars, but, often, better. You can also do that with Protopage, but it looks horrid and doesn’t auto-update. This is especially handy for lengthy Yahoo portfolio listings, but it’s nice also to keep Calendar/PIM pages like Kiko and spreadsheets and word-processor web apps like those of Zoho and Writely/Google all in one place.

By: c0ke

c0ke — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 18:57:14 +0000

Only usage of Ajax would be for getting the latest news (sush as Google homepage) or getting results/auto-complete/suggestions for keyword searches. You would prolly have to have a business with popular content (such as Netflix) to use Ajax with your homepage.

By: Julie

Julie — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:38:09 +0000

I use Google\ig all the time, too.

I think there will be a market for those sorts of tools amongst the not-so-savvy crowd. Yes, RSS and feed readers are beautiful inventions, but they’ve been around for how many years now? And yet the basic web user still struggles with email — much less feed readers. Once that user level discovers ajaxified homepages, I could see them taking off.

By: Alex Duffield

Alex Duffield — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:25:06 +0000

Come on now people!! Is a knife good or bad??

Ajax is a TOOL. This is as stupid as saying “All HTML pages are bad” …

This same stupid subject came up over and over again when flash was gettign popular. “Flash is bad” What a bunch of BS. Again its just a tool. It is what the developer does with the tool that is good or bad.

By: Tahir

Tahir — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:16:59 +0000

Stakeholders in these sites needs to realize the problem seems to be with the business not the concept. Concept can be better put to use, if used as a tools to retrieve information which user needs. Ajax home page can definitely steam line your home page as long as retrieving content you really need. Agreed that weather and various RSS can keep individual entertained for few minutes but why go on the web and look at ads when I can do the same from my reader.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:05:47 +0000

Thanks for the mention. I wrote the article as many Web 2.0 companies don’t appear to have any visible revenue streams. Who knows what the future holds, but for now these AJAX homepages can be filed under ‘cool / watch this space’, but not under ‘big bucks’.

The problem is that many Web 2.0 sites are developed because genius developers CAN develop them. Not because they should. And it is hard to know where to draw the line… is it about business, or is it about pleasure?

You’ve gotta love the technology – AJAX is supreme, from a user experience perspective. But I just wonder whether these sites will still be alive and kicking next year, or the one after.

Turns out Fold.com might be making some sort of resurrection – we’ll soon see. Let’s hope they extend compatibility to IE and grab more market share. And that it has some sort of revenue model…

By: Sebastien Brunot

Sebastien Brunot — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:14:28 +0000

I use Google\ig all the time.

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:38:08 +0000

Agreed. When these first came out, I was all about them. I tried all the major ones, such as Google/ig, netvibes, protopage . . .

Today, I don’t use any of them anymore. I never stopped to think about why. But, when I do, I think it’s because there’s really no use for them. For me, the most important thing is a really good RSS reader. And, at best, these AJAX front pages were adequent RSS readers.

Now, I mainly use Bloglines. And, now that Flock is out in a wide release Beta. I’ve tried Flock. And, I love it.

All this AJAX home page stuff sort of reminds me of the Portal craze in the business enterprise world a few years back. And, by Portal, I’m talking about WebLogic Portal, IBM Portal, Plumtree . . . things like that. It’s all nice to have personalized front pages. But, it’s sort of a “So what now?” kind of thing.

Just my thoughts.

By: SchizoDuckie

SchizoDuckie — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 13:36:37 +0000

The problem with the ajax homepages is: they’re cool, but useless.

How very nice, the weather and some widget with an rss feed on your start page, and you can even re-arrange them.

Cool, I agree, but what’s the use for the average person? and what’s the use of having 500 ‘ajax homepage’ sites that all do exactly the same?