WebReview is a new extension for Firefox that attempts to make your start page smarter, and more suggestive based on past browsing habits. If you've used Google's Chrome, or have been keeping up with Mozilla's latest efforts to change what users are seeing when they first fire up their browser or open a new tab, the idea behind WebReview is the same.
When you install WebReview in Firefox (which for now is the only browser this extension runs in) it will give you four different sets of links. Like Chrome it will tell you both the last few tabs you had open, along with some of your most visited pages. Where it really shines, however is showing you a grouping of sites you visit daily, along with a suggestion of sites you may be interested in going to. It sorts these out by what day it is, along with the time. So if, for example, you visit a few news blogs every Monday morning it will keep track of that and offer them up as suggestions when you fire up your browser that same time of day.
Users with WebReview installed can see a slew of links when they load up their browser, including their most visited pages, along with suggestions of what they should read based on past browsing history.
(Credit: WebReview)The add-on provides more than just links though, it's also a secondary history tracker that can be used instead of the one that ships with Firefox. It will track all your browsing history and give you some powerful tools to go through it all including the option to sort by both domain and the number of visits. It also provides a thumbnail view of each page which you can preview before going back for another visit.
If you're not into going through the entirety of your history there's an alternate way to track how you browsed. Called graph view, it shows the breadcrumb trail of how you went from site to site for that entire session. You can also go back to specific days and see a large graph for the entire day. Visually it's very interesting, and exploratory at the same time.
WebReview was created by German developer Andreas Wagner as part of his thesis for University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern/Germany. It's also experimental, so you'll need to be registered with Mozilla's add-ons site to give it a go.
On Monday, Yahoo will begin the weeklong roll out of the new My Yahoo to users in all markets. The start page service is graduating from the much-coveted beta status, and integrating improvements made over the last several months like new and third-party content modules, a streamlined header, and advertising that's not as in-your-face as previous iterations. (See full list of updates below.)
The move paves the way for Yahoo's open-platform strategy, which was announced in late April. It lets developers create widgets that work on other Yahoo properties and OpenSocial in the hopes of expanding how and where content can be used.
All My Yahoo users should have the new version of by July 14.
From the release:
Custom-designed modules with more of great content from select publishers (such as New York Times, People, Wall Street Journal, etc.) New and improved Yahoo! modules, including Top Picks from Your Page, Flickr, Note to Self, To Do List, Movie Showtimes, Scoreboard, Stock Portfolios, TV Listings, Calendar, Yahoo! Buzz, etc. New modules that provide access to third-party services (i.e., Netflix, Gmail, POP mail, Facebook) New header with easier customization tools for adding content and choosing options, as well as tabbed browsing for multiple pages More control, with additional page layout options, a less intrusive advertising approach, and easy drag-and-drop functionality
My favorite start page, Netvibes, is getting an interesting upgrade. The new "Ginger" version gets social features for sharing your start-page widgets and layouts, as well as a status feed reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter. Netvibes Ginger also makes it easier to add content to your pages.
The site will be updated with the Ginger release in mid-February, but we have some invitations to the private beta now...read down to the end for details.
Still my favorite start page.
With Ginger, all Netvibes users get a "universe" page--a public, shared collection of widgets and tabs that anyone can access. Here's a quick example. It's easy enough to send items from your private pages to your universe, and if you want to point people your favorite widgets or blogs, it's a simple solution. If you happen to have an online presence on several different service (for example, a professional blog, a personal blog, a social network, Delicious, Twitter, etc.), this is a way to put them all together so your friends can see what you are up to.
Now you can create a ticker of your Netvibes actions. You can see your buddies' feeds, too.
With Netvibes new "activity" window, you can now see what your friends are up to...on Netvibes, anyway. When you're in a widget on Netvibes, you can flag an item to save it to either your private or your public feed, and in the activities window you can see either your own private starred items, your public ones, or those of the people you are following. (Unfortunately, you can't see all these activities together in one window, and you can't flag an item from its detail page, only from its headline in the widget.)
The concept of following other users on Netvibes is a conceptual stretch. While it's easy enough to find other Netvibes users and add them to your Netvibes circle, one has to wonder if this bare-bones social network can possibly get traction. Netvibes Tariq Krim told me, "We wouldn't do it if we didn't add value." So, he said, "We will announce plug-ins so it can automatically sync with Twitter, Facebook, and so on."
Adding feeds and widgets in Ginger is easier thanks to a good visual directory and search function.
Maybe that will help. Krim is trying to make Netvibes into a hub for social information. If it works without requiring that your friends are also Netvibes users, it could be useful. But if it's just the Netvibes social network, I predict rather limited uptake.
Evolutionary changes in Netvibes include a better way to add content to your pages. There's a very attractive catalog of widgets you can add, and you can preview each one before you drop it on a page.
As a current Netvibes user, I like the new interface but I can't say that any of the new features bowl me over. The new methods for adding content are nice, though, and will make the service more approachable for newbies.
But the social bits are puzzling. I've never thought of Netvibes as a social platform. I don't really want it to be social. I get enough social in all the other sites I use.
I could be wrong, though. If you sign up for the Netvibes Ginger private beta, add me to your network (search for "rafe"), and we can see if we like it. Update: Webware users burned through our first allotment of invitations to the Ginger private beta very quickly, but there are 100 more invitations available here--use the new code WWMORE100.
My dad is a staunch user of MyHQ, which lets you organize your bookmarks in little clusters of text links. While it's highly functional, the service hasn't been updated since mid-1999. Regardless, the big draw is its simplicity, portability, and near-instant load time, which is where Web start pages can really shine over standard browser bookmarking systems.
I've taken a look at quite a few of these sites over the past year, and one I think is good enough to pass my Dad's test is Symbaloo, which like MyHQ is incredibly simple to set up. It also runs fast. Instead of going the route of showing you a live page preview, a la Opera's Speed Dial or Only2Clicks.com (review), Symbaloo lets you organize a smattering of your favorite links in a giant, rectangular grid. Depending on your display resolution, Symbaloo will scale itself to fit, along with providing quick and easy identifiers like site logos or icons to help you organize your links visually. In the center of it all is a search box that can be replaced with about two dozen various search tools that sit beside your bookmarks. You also can manually add more from a provided directory.
Make multiple tabs of link clusters, with all sorts of items from search links, to your favorite sites.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In addition to search tools and bookmarks, Symbaloo has a page that puts together links of the top news stories on Yahoo and MSNBC. While this isn't an entirely novel concept in and of itself, the way it's been implemented with stories getting real estate depending on their suggested importance is neat. It reminds me a lot of AOL's Mgnet news service, which launched in July, although with less usefulness considering the stories aren't coming from your saved bookmarks
... Read more
Only2Clicks is one of the few Web services I've seen lately whose name tells exactly what it does. The concept is pretty straightforward--set up your favorite Web sites, and the service will load them up in a grid, with photo thumbnails for each. You can add and remove any number of sites, and the thumbnails will be refreshed each time you reload the page. You can also re-organize the links with simple drag and drop. The idea is to set Only2Clicks as your start page, so you'll be able to quickly eyeball each site before figuring out where you want to go.
This isn't a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact Opera built in similar functionality to their browser earlier in the year with their Speed Dial feature. What sets Only2Clicks apart, however, are its tabs, which let you create as many pages of linked thumbnails as your heart desires. Each one can be set as your home page by dragging a permalink on the top to the home button on your browser.
Alternately, for IE users, there's a plugin called IE7Pro, which has an "Easy Homepage" option, which accomplishes a similar effect with pretty looking thumbnails. You can read our hands-on with it, or download it from CNET's Download.com. If you're a Firefox user, you could also use the MyPortal extension which will create a live link cloud of all your bookmarks in their correct hierarchy. This is incredibly helpful if you have all your links organized into folders. Rafe and I are partial to using Netvibes to organize our favorite sites. While it may lack the pretty thumbnails, you actually get to see what's on the page before you bother visiting, which might save you a click to begin with.
[via Lifehacker]
Make your own start pages, full of live icons to click on with Only2Clicks.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
I'm trying to figure out what the hubbub is about the My Yahoo competitor Pageflakes tonight. Both TechCrunch and Mashable have just fallen over each other to cover what appears to be somewhat minor news about Pageflakes. These stories (and, obviously, this one too) are based on an embargoed press release that Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen sent out last night, in which he boasts that, "over 100,000 Pagecasters...are enriching the lives of millions of Internet users around the world."
Creating an aggregation page to share with the world is easy.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In English, this means that Pageflakes' community features are a success. And although the hype around this news is a bit much, these features, while not at all new, are really good. Pageflakes lets you easily share your own page with the entire Web, and another sharing option lets you make pages that can be edited by groups.
Dedicated "metagator" sites like OriginalSignal and PopUrls (two of my favorite reference sources) may not be long for this world. Pageflakes makes it possible for anyone to almost become their own Original Signal. For example, here's a (very lame, but you get the idea) Web 2.0 page I built in about 30 seconds.
I don't agree with Cohen that, "The mashed-up page is the ultimate user contribution," as he said to me in an IM. To me, the ultimate user contribution is original content--blogs, videos, and so on. Assembling and editing is a craft, to be sure, but creating is the core activity that makes aggregation businesses work.
But there are some cool Pageflakes community-created pages, which you can check out in the Pageflakes directory. There are some good ones in there. I like what Pageflakes enables, and it is good to see aggregation pages emerge as a new art form. Sort of.
See also NetVibes' "Universe" project and the latest news on My Yahoo. And a previous interview with Dan Cohen.
Got late word from Yahoo today about the company's new update of My Yahoo, due to roll out at 9:00 PM PDT tonight. As it turns out, I already have access to the features. So this report is based on hands-on access to the new service. We also covered an earlier version of the new My Yahoo back in March.
My Yahoo now has a slick pop-down window for adding new page elements.
(Credit: CNET Networks)There are a few new modules available to My Yahoo users, like improved calendar and bookmarks widgets. The biggest update, though, is a new method to update your personal page, called "inline personalization." Now you don't have to hop to a new page to select a module and add it. Instead, a little window drops down over your page and any changes you make are immediately reflected on your page, still visible underneath. It sure beats going to a separate page, as Google's personal page, iGoogle (news) makes you do whenever you want to add content.
Yahoo's new implementation of home page personalization is quite good. The menu that opens up over your home page is clear and easy to use. But inline personalization is not unique. Both Netvibes and Pageflakes (roundup) let you add content to your personal page without jumping away from where you are. Furthermore, Netvibes and Pageflakes also let you add RSS feeds by entering in just the URL of the site. Yahoo has a good directory of popular blogs that can be added with just a few clicks, but adding feeds not in the list requires that you find the complex URL of the RSS feed itself and paste that in.
I would still recommend the new My Yahoo, especially to nongeeks. It's simple but capable, it's slicker than Google's personal page, and it does most of the stuff that the upstart home page services offer. Personally, though, I am sticking with Netvibes. There's no killer feature in My Yahoo that makes me want to switch back to it (I used it for years until I got hooked on Netvibes), and it's too tedious to add RSS feeds to Yahoo.
Update, 5/17/07: You may have trouble getting to the new features today. Apparently the debut isn't going super-smoothly, and it's not happening all at once. My contact at Yahoo dropped me this note last night after I posted the above evaluation: "The rollout of new features did begin tonight but it will be gradual and complete tomorrow."
Want to add some pizzazz to your Google personalized home page? This week Google is offering six themes that people can use to decorate their page. Google typically prefers simple, clean, text-only pages for its sites, with the notable exception being the doodle on its main search page. With this announcement Google is recognizing that some people might want to add some some color to their personalized home pages.
The themes include a beach, a cityscape, a Japanese tea house, the four seasons, the sky, and a bus stop. They will change dynamically, depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. For example, the beach scene will show a sunrise or a sunset that corresponds to the local time and the characters in the bus stop theme will hold umbrellas if it is raining.
My Yahoo's new interface
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo unveiled a new look and feel for its My Yahoo personalized start pages today, bringing the service up to speed with an increasingly customizable, Ajax-driven Web. It's about time: competitors like Google Desktop and Pageflakes have also been rolling out new updates recently. The new My Yahoo is not readily available; rather, it's in a limited beta that only a handful of random Yahoo members can opt into thus far. The full version will be rolled out over the next few months.
We haven't tried it out yet, but Yahoo representatives stressed that this is "truly a beta." In other words, there are going to be some bugs. If you're one of the Yahoo users who's been given access to the new beta, let us know how it is.
So what new features can you expect from the latest iteration of My Yahoo?
- A slick new interface, designed to better match the main Yahoo start page (which got its own redesign last year).
- Rollover pop-up previews of news stories and other content so that you can take a look before you click to another page.
- Suggested content offerings depending on what other Yahoo services you use. If you play a lot of Yahoo Games, your My Yahoo start page will automatically include a selection of game modules. You can change that, of course.
- Easier sharing features that allow you to share a selected piece of content (like a news story), an individual content module, or your entire My Yahoo page via e-mail. Click on the "share" tool, and a dialog box will pop up that allows you to send it to a friend. Your friend does not need to be a Yahoo member for this.
- A focus beyond news that emphasizes rich media like Flash games, videos, up-to-the-moment weather and finance data, etc.
- Ease of use, featuring drag-and-drop customization and plenty of drop-down menus for tweaking the page to your needs. You're Time magazine's person of the year--clearly you deserve the simplest yet most advanced customization features for your My Yahoo page.
UPDATE: Sign up for the beta while you still can here.
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