Homepage wars...

I mentioned Netvibes as my favorite RSS reader in my last post. Apart from being that, it is also the undisputed king of personalized home pages at the moment. Netvibes was and remains the only web service that I accepted and started using within five minutes of having seen it first. And it has continued to remain the default browser home page since then.

The personalized homepage market is dotted by some really big players and ferocious competition. Google's offering was the first one I ever tried and hated. I do so till date. Coming from a heavy-weight like them, it is just too bad a service when compared to what's available elsewhere on the web. Microsoft's start.com and now live.com have always shown immense potential, but have never really delivered the right blows. Smaller players like Pageflakes & protopage have provided far better products. Both have been my second favorites at different points in time, but Netvibes has always managed to pull me back.

With it's latest upgrade a couple of weeks back, Netvibes added the eagerly awaited tabs feature, which let's users categorize their modules into tabbed pages. Live.com, pageflakes & protopage hve had this feature for a while now, but Netvibes' implementation seems the most complete by far with easy drag & drop across tabs and extreme ease-of-use.

Overall, for me netvibes rules the roost when it comes to personalized home pages, but there's still a huge scope for improvement and for the others to catch up. Pageflakes has been releasing new modules at an insane pace and v3 of protopage is just around the corner, hopefully pushing the envelope further and driving more innovation into the genre.