Pageflakes Takes It Up a Notch

Last month, we named Pageflakes as one of 25 Web Sites to Watch. And if you were watching it last week, you noticed that this customizable, widget-driven home page--I think of it as one of the big three, along with NetVibes and iGoogle--launched a major upgrade that's worth a look.

(Side note: My Yahoo may have more users than Pageflakes, NetVibes, and iGoogle combined, and it's been around a lot longer. But it's not an open platform, so it's infinitely less customizable, and vastly less interesting.)

The Pageflakes folks (Pagefolks?) say their biggest goal is to make the service easy, and you get to most of its features by pressing on a big button that opens up a control panel full of options for customizing your page. Pageflakes now has much better theming features than NetVibes or iGoogle--you can select from a bunch of preprogrammed skins, or put together your own look with customizable color schemes and images you upload. And if your PageFlakes page has multiple tabs, each one can have its own theme.

The widgets that make Pageflakes so useful haven't really changed, but there are almost a quarter million of them, including newsfeeds, media players, tools such as note-takers, and lots and lots of widgets that hook into other Web-based services you might use. A new "Anything Flake" lets you insert your own text (with cool Microsoft Word-like editing features) and paste in HTML; the latter feature lets you embed external widgets such as the YouTube player. And Pageflakes widgets, unlike those offered by NetVibes and iGoogle, are embeddable on other sites, so you can put them on your own site.

Pageflakes has offered a page-sharing feature called Pagecasts for awhile--it lets you create pages, then publish them so any other Pageflakes user can see and use 'em. Now those people can add your Pagecast as a tab on their own Pageflakes page--so it's always handy--and can edit it further if they so choose.

Multiple media companies, including the Washington Post, Entertainment Tonight, and CNN, now have official Pagecasts. And here's one I put together with links to PC World stories and video. (It's not the result of a formal partnership with Pageflakes--I assembled it in less than an hour last Friday--but I see that they're promoting it as a featured pagecast at the moment.)

(Side note: We already have a similar PC World page on NetVibes, created with its Pagecast-like NetVibes Universe feature.)

Pageflakes has a new feature called People that turns the service into a social network, albeit a rudimentary one: You can post a public profile of yourself and the Pagecasts you've created, and link to your "Favorite People" among other Pageflakes users. (Unlike friends on a service like Facebook, Favorite People aren't necessarily people you know--and they don't need to give permission for you to add them to your profile.)

The new Pageflakes is fun and useful, and for the most part pretty easy to get around. (I was occasionally confused by certain parts of the interface, though--depending on where you are, the People feature is represented either by an icon or by the word "People"--and I've run into a glitch with the embed-a-widget-in-another-site feature that's preventing me from doing so with the PCW Pagecast I created.)

Building these personalizable home page services so their performance is snappy rather than sluggish seems to be a challenge: So far, I haven't found Pageflakes to be as zippy as iGoogle, but it's a lot more bearable than NetVibes, which--for me, at least, with the pages I've put together for myself--has been almost unbearably slow lately.

Is there a clear winner among these three services? It's a tough call, and it depends in part on which of them has the widgets you're looking for. For instance, if you use Zoho's browser-based office tools, you might lean towards NetVibes, since there's a NetVibes widget that lets you get to your Zoho documents from a NetVibes page, but no equivalent widgets for Pageflakes or iGoogle. (It'll be a great day if all the companies with widget platforms ever get together and decide on one standard, so every widget works everywhere.)

But this new Pageflakes has caught up with NetVibes' major features and snuck ahead in some areas (such as theming), and I've found it to be faster. iGoogle, meanwhile, is fast, friendly, and useful, but sparser on advanced features. So all in all, Pageflakes may have a slight overall edge at the moment.

I'm certainly going to be spending some time living in it--and if NetVibes continues to drag, performance-wise, I might dump it altogether for Pageflakes...