Anne Truitt Zelenka

I’ve been playing around with Ajax start pages today. I plan to review the more popular ones for Web Worker Daily or perhaps just write some sort of feature article about using them, but so far I’ve just felt frustrated by them. They are so far from doing what I want.

The three I’m trying so far are Pageflakes, Google’s personalized home page, and Netvibes. There are others of course–lots of them, like Protopage and Yahoo’s.

An alternative would be to use a desktop-based capability like the Mac Dashboard. But I’m committed to getting my life online. I’ve had two personal computing “accidents” in the last year. In March, my hard drive died when my PC was shipped from Hawaii to Colorado. Then I spilled coffee all over my laptop just a couple weeks ago–I’m still waiting on a replacement keyboard. I didn’t lose any critical data in either case, but I did have to start from near scratch in configuring my desktop computing in both cases.

My ideal web start page would include these things:

• Calendar and to do list reminders (Google Calendar right now, though I may switch to Zimbra since that’s what RedMonk uses) with the ability to quickly add new items to both. My to do list is paper, but I could see some benefit in getting some of that online.
• All my email inboxes, integrated with a little mail composer. I will probably just forward everything to gmail–I finally shelled out $20 to be able to forward my Yahoo mail–and it’s not too hard to display gmail on any of the start pages because it offers free pop access, unlike Yahoo. This is one area where the start pages actually do work like I expect, especially Pageflakes, which has a little composer window right there for quick emails.
• Access to search, maps, Wikipedia, weather, stock quotes, and world clocks. That’s easy. All the start pages do that.
• A little music player where I can switch between last.fm, Pandora, and my iTunes library (which would, incidentally, be stored online so I wouldn’t be without it just because I’m accident-prone). Haven’t seen this in any of them, but I haven’t looked very hard yet.
• RSS feed widgets, of course. They all do this, with different sets of features. I’ll need to look more closely at how usable each implementation is and whether it might serve for all my feed reading needs. I may need a separate reader–right now I use Bloglines, but people seem to like Google Reader, and Netvibes is somewhat popular as a feed reader.
• An integrated presence/IM/phone call widget that would tell me about the status of my social and work networks and would let me IM any of my contacts using their preferred network. [Ha ha! Keep dreaming!] It would display an integrated buddy list from the various IMs that my friends and family use. It’d be really cool if it included any public info about them–where they are with the time and weather of where they are, what’s on their calendar at that moment, what music they’re listening to, if they’ve just posted anything online like a blog post or a bookmark. It’d be a turbocharged combo of me.dium, meebo, skype, and iotum. It would let me specify my own status (online or off, busy or not, what I’m working on, how to reach me, etc.) and publish it through all the IM networks that my contacts are on. It would let me make phone calls too then record them as podcasts with the click of a button. We are so far from doing this. The start page vendors are obviously not to blame, since they’re hampered by the proliferation of IM networks. But this to me is critical information to combine, distill, and display on my start page.

I’m sure I’ll come up with more as I get further on this project. If you have any ideas about what you’d like or have any opinions on the various start page capabilities, let me know.