Ahh Snap! New Start Page Technologies look to over through Yahoo!

Back in the day when AOL was just starting to fall off and mp3 were found via ftp aggregate sites and run by Winamp. The internet boom was in full thralls, google was but a glimpse still a student project and Yahoo! and MSN had yet to start their buying binge of upstarts. There was a great site called snap.com. Snap was years ahead of the rest internet start pages and let user configure just about everything and let the user decide exactly what content to view. Like most upstarts though it was bought out, and NBC to its detriment had no clue why it was so popular. Soon the site was covered with ads content was limited to NBC affiliates and they changed the name to NBCi with a lame TV campaign to go with it. I mourned snap for long time (quick note it seems the snap.com namespace has since been bought by a new search start up) and jumped from aggregate site to aggregate site tried netscape, msn, excite, go. None of them had the usability of snap. I finally settled on Yahoo but was never satisfied. Two new startups though have now entered the battle with clean design tons of options Netvibes and PageFlakes utilizes modules to direct content from social network sites, news feeds, blogs, and custom content. Plus they allow sharing of custom design pages. Check out my Erie tabs NV | PF . In my use Netvibes seems to be a little more user friendly interface but PageFlakes has some more power features. I.E. the global pages work much nicer and you can allow additional user to modify the page. According to Wall Street Journal today, Yahoo! is in the process of revamping there MyYahoo! service to answer these newcomers.

AJSPS

P.S. I obviously don’t know what thralls means but it sounded right. Maybe I was thinking throngs I don’t know.

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