Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo

Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Pageflakes' new CEO, Dan Cohen. Pageflakes makes a "single page aggregator" service. It's a good site to use as your home page. You can add RSS feeds, widgets, and all sorts of content to the page, and you can set up multiple tabs on your site for different categories of content. [See previous Webware coverage.]

Pageflakes' special power is its community focus. You can easily share your page layouts with other people and even let them modify your pages. Cohen sees Pageflakes as a good service for groups or clubs: people can collect resources from the around the Web to make them available to all their members. Not a bad idea.

Can a small site like Pageflakes compete against Yahoo's configurable home page, My Yahoo (or Google, AOL, or Microsoft)? Cohen admitted that the number of users on his service is quite low. He also said his other upstart competitors (NetVibes, YourMinis, etc) aren't doing much better. But he said his work experience at Google and Yahoo has given him insight into what works and doesn't. And, he believes Pageflakes benefits from being a smaller company. Due to his company's focus and nimbleness, he said, he can build a better mousetrap, and do it faster. One thing he'll never be able to fight is Yahoo's marketing reach, though.

If you want more than what the big sites' start pages offer, Pageflakes is worth checking out. I use its competitor, NetVibes, and I really like it, but they function similarly. Both have a lot of fancy modules you can put on your pages, but I just use them to read my RSS feeds. There is one key difference: Pageflakes loads more quickly.

Play the video for more.

[lorenzinho]

exportable widgets

Hey Rafe, one other neat thing you can do with PageFlakes is export your widgets / modules to other sites. I don't think that Netvibes has launched this yet.

[paragmathur]

Effect of Yahoo Patent

Rafe,

I'm wondering what how the patent related to customized start pages that Yahoo was awarded recently (reported on TechCrunch) will affect start page sites like Pageflakes and Netvibes.

ZCubes (http://www.zcubes.com) also provides a very quick, easy and immensely flexible way to create unlimited customized web pages containing RSS Feeds, Gadgets and a lot more (including photos, videos, even your paintings and handwritings). You can publish and share your pages ver easily with others.

[devicenull]

Custom launchpages are overrated

All that custom stuff is overrated, I'll continue using popurls.com