It looks obvious

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein

What a waste

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Tech crunch reports on round A financing for PageFlakes . I’m already lost with all the personalized pages that look basically the same and are un-useful in basically the same level.

Quick  and incomplete count of similar pages will include Live , NetVibes , Eskobo ,Protopage , Myhommy and the personalize page of Google . I guess that the VC money is given not because of the AJaX but because of the hope that these service will be the Web 2.0 version of the mythological portals . However, and as cool as all these pages are, they are going to follow the footsteps of the web 1.0 portals and fail.

The problem is that these pages, like most armies, fighting the previous war instead of the next one. Attempting to build a portal is futile regardless the richness of the user interface. Sadly all of this pages are very nice but they don’t solve any real need. The real challenge is how to make sense in the flood of content. How to deliver content that interest the user, when they want it. It is obvious that none of these pages even tries to confront this challenge.

My dream page will not ask me to subscribe to RSS , since RSS is a tool for the application not for the user. Instead it will offer me content, base on my interest and my priorities. It will find the content, not only the specific post but the entire content.

Until then I’m doomed to go through my hundreds of feeds, which none of these pages can handle in convenient way. What a waste of money.

 

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Written by Rogel

May 30th, 2006 at 11:32 pm

Posted in companies that nobody need

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Viewing 2 Comments

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    Hm... obviously we all have different views. Yours is quite negative (and I respect that). While I agree that many start pages still look similar, it is also not very surprising since the whole business just started a few month ago. You pointed out the real need for users - and that's exactly what we are aiming at. Give us a few more months to develope and implement features and content. Along the way, give us feedback and suggestions so we can actually build what you want.

    Best regards
    Ole Brandenburg
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    Thanks for your comments Ole. The problem is in the concept - it seems like the focus is in the features not in the users.
    The idea that the users will subscribe RSS isn't very practical. My list of feeds contains more then 300 of them - I don't want a page that contains each of these feeds - I want a page that will take the RSS to where they belong the backend.
    The concept of PageFlakes, as the other pages, isn't aiming to handle this challenge and this is one of the reasons that the "real need for users" will probably remain unfulfilled - although you are very talented

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