Corner of Seven

In the realm of personal web startup pages and managing, these two titular offerings stand out.  I offer to you as readers the option to try out both, in hopes that one of them sticks for you.  For me, it makes the time working around trying to find my usual morning reads of pages, blogs and activities like twitter and facebook that much easier to take care of.

iGoogle

available here

iGoogle offers the ability to customize a page right off the bat – giving you the choice between a set of various feeds and widgets that are predefined for those subjects of interest.

I chose for my example here, Technology, News, Humor, and Music.  I also added in the zip code for Dubuque, IA to show local weather.  This data is saved via cookies to the system you are using – those cookies stay local, so unless you tie this to a Google account, these settings are lost to you until you return to your home system.

Navigating the page wasn’t too bad, but there were some jerky things every once in a while.  These issues were most likely caused by heavy widgets that are hard on the system to render in the first place, like the YouTube and Date/Time widgets.  Dragging widgets around was a bit flaky (the right hand column would jump to the middle, nowhere near the cursor), and the middle column just didn’t move.  I also found response of things to be a bit slower than the other options available.

The tie-in to Google accounts can be both a blessing and a curse.  If you run only one Google account, then everything is right there, waiting and available for you.  If you run multiple Google accounts, then you’ll find the fact that you can’t run the same page between both (or more) accounts in sync.

Netvibes

available here

I guess I’m slightly biased, because I’ve been using netvibes for over a year now, but I still feel that it is the best offering of the mix. Upon approaching the page for the first time, you are also welcomed with a page-design wizard:

After which, the page that is defined for you is present.  One of the more interesting thing about netvibes is its tab system.  These tabs allow you to control what content goes in which page, and these pages and layouts can be shared with friends. Also of note is the ability to add a custom RSS feed, with varying options as to the presentation of that feed.  Some examples on my premade page:

Netvibes isn’t without issues, though – load times for many widgets on a page are slow at best, and trying to operate on those pages by moving things around is also hindered when running.  Widget dragging can also be very choppy, especially when dragging between columns and across transparencies.  Probably more of a rendering issue than it is a page issue at that point.

Overall, I use netvibes because it seems more clean and organized.  I leave it up to you to see what options you prefer.

Tags: ajax, browsing, google, homepage, netvibes, rss, startup pages, Web

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.