Personalize Your Internet Homepage
Admit it: You spend a lot of time online. So do we all these days, no? One way to improve your online efficiency is to set up a personalized homepage that displays the items you like to see on a regular basis. It's faster than hunting for them on someone else's template (like Yahoo's). A number of services offer you ways of doing that.
Google has become the Big Daddy of personalized homepages. Google's reach is so great, virtually all major content sources can be placed on the site. But it has its limitations. For one, the list of international cities for which you can find the weather is far smaller than its erstwhile competitor at Yahoo. On the other hand, Google has an easy module for checking currency exchange rates. To keep up with the competition, Google just announced the ability to add graphic “themes” to the page. They're OK, but don't do much for me.
Yahoo has a much nicer module for setting up news feeds on the scores of your favorite teams. But despite some of Yahoo's nice features, it doesn't appear to be a favorite of the first adopters and tech freaks. Tech website Read/Write Web recently conducted a survey of its tech savvy readers. According to the results, only 11 percent of the survey respondents don't use a personalized homepage. The surprising winner was Web 2.0 startup Pageflakes, with 31 percent of the users. Google came in a strong second, with another smaller, tech-savvy site, Netvibes, in third. Yahoo received just 5 percent of the votes.
Based on these results, I'm going to give Pageflakes a try. I won't make it my personalized homepage just yet (I use Google), but one thing I like is Pageflakes' ability to send your homepage to others, or to make it public for the Pageflake community. If any of you use Pageflakes, send us your page! We'll update this after giving Pageflakes some use.
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