In my continuing quest to ditch Yahoo!’s portal page, I also found Netvibes. Its very similar to Pageflakes, but it runs faster on Flock/Firefox, so that’s something.

It seems to offer many of the same features as Pageflakes that I mentioned previously.

Other first impressions: I like the tabbed Search widget on Netvibes. The email widget is nice. Pages within the widgets for feeds is a nice touch. The RSS reader is pleasant.

I can’t seem to share my portal (aka Pageflakes’ Pagecast), but I’m not sure I will be using that feature anyways.

Initial Netvibes Rating:

Tags: Netvibes, Pageflakes, portal, web clips

So, having nothing to do with Microsoft’s imminent purchase of Yahoo!, I’ve been trying to find an alternative to Yahoo’s pretty comprehensive portal (My Yahoo!). I just don’t like Yahoo! in general. They’re a bunch of, well, yahoos.

I ran across Pageflakes about a month ago and spent a few minutes playing with back then. As I started to think about it more, Yahoo!’s page isn’t really giving me that much, and its a bit of a pain to use. So I went back to Pageflakes today, and created my self a new portal.

There’s some cool stuff available on Pageflakes. Such as being able to Pagecast (basically, publicly post) your portal: I create my portal and I can share it so you can see what I’ve done, what I’m tracking, etc. And if I include a personalized application, such as Facebook, it’ll show you my profile info, as I choose to customize it. You get the stocks I’m tracking, the RSSs I’m watching, everything.

You can also create your own theme, modifying colors, background images, etc. You can also modify the CSS, which I haven’t played with much, yet.

The downside? It seems a little slow in Flock/Firefox. However, it was pretty snappy in Safari. I’ve noticed Mozilla-based browsers are memory hogs, and its probably related.

Have I found a new homepage? Maybe. This also has to compete with Flock’s My World page, which is pretty neat-o, but not nearly as comprehensive.

More to come, I guess.

Link

Inital Pageflakes Rating:

Update 02/18/2008: I’ve abandoned Pageflakes for Netvibes. Read more here.

Updated Pageflakes Rating:

Tags: Pageflakes, portal, Review, rss, Yahoo