TechNayak

Its a classic case of enterprise level aesthetics penetrating into the consumer space - remember business dashboards ? Those simple looking overviews of businesses that important folk look at during their busy working days. The same concept of a dashboard is what we know today as a startpage. Given the multitude of services that we use on the web like your mail, bookmarks, blogs, chat , news feeds , stock price watchers etc it was essential to have a single point of view for the wealth of these services. When widgets started becoming popular, people foresaw a site full of widgets doing your favorite things and so the start page was born. One of the earliest efforts ,and really amazing one that, was netvibes, that started the ball rolling. Their list of services that they offer on their start page is phenomenal with a wide array of options.

The biggies themselves are toying with these start pages as they see it as a personalized version of their already popular portals like my.yahoo or the Infamous Google search page. The idea is that there are already millions flocking to these pages, why not make it more viral and add to it personalization and provide a dashboard so that people just don’t have to go to another website. Though it has worked well for homegrown services, I don’t really know how other services that bank for users , whose revenues depend on users visiting their sites and generating pageviews, will reach to such an offering.

Its just evolution I suppose that the concept is dying a premature death, primarily due to the growing popularity of desktop widgets, thanks to the efforts of mac, google desktop and of course , Windows Vista. But still discovery of these widgets will remain online and technologies like Apollo and Silverlight, are making this process of discovery and done more easier. Using Apollo technology, YourMinis , another flash based startpage service will allow for drag and drop of their web widgets onto the desktop. Now how about that, you like a widget on your start page and so you decide to give it some attention by dragging it to your desktop. The concept is more fact than fiction with a lot more services working to achieve the similar desktop-web experience.

I guess my job of ranting on start pages is done, here are some popular start pages to start of with. You can even read about some start page reviews here.

Some start pages to get you started