In the hopes of boosting my productivity by using an all-in-one dashboard and start page, I reviewed four Ajax web start pages and one Flash-based start page for Web Worker Daily: Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google’s customized homepage, Protopage, and yourminis. I had a few ideas beforehand what I hoped to find, but I knew I would be mostly frustrated.
Here’s my conclusion: they all suck. They fail to present the information I need in a format that I can quickly grasp. They don’t allow me to do the things I should be able to do from there. They add more work to my life compared to just setting up a Firefox window with a tab each for Gmail, Zimbra, Google Calendar, and Google Reader.
How do Ajax start pages suck? Let me count the ways.
1. Oblivious, uncommunicative widgets. The world clock doesn’t check with the calendar widget to see that I’m in Seattle rather than Denver and show the appropriate time accordingly. The weather widget likewise shows only what I’ve told it to show–weather for wherever I usually am but not for where I am today. The to do lists don’t integrate with my calendar and email to create reminders. The RSS feed widgets don’t integrate with my feed reader of choice, Google Reader. This is a specific example of a more general problem on the web… that open data APIs may become less and less common as UI widgets proliferate. Google recently dropped support for their SOAP search API and directed potential users to their Ajax widgets. This kind of widget-centric approach makes it much harder to integrate data from various apps behind the scenes.
2. It’s the read/write web, not the read-only web. Though the Pageflakes POP mail widget does include a mini-compose capability, that ability to push information from the page is in the distinct minority among start page widgets. Most widgets only dumbly read web data. I’d like to add a Delicious link right from the RSS widget showing the links from my Delicious network, add an event to my calendar, push a to do list item onto Remember the Milk instead of having it trapped in some minor league to do list that a widgeteer developed. The key to this seems to be some type of bidirectional sharing with feed data, a la Microsoft’s Simple Sharing Extensions. Whatever happened to that, anyway?
3. Emergency! Emergency! Red Numbers everywhere! Alert! Alert! But none of them mean anything. Netvibes shows a count of my Yahoo! messages even if I’ve already read them, making me think that something needs attending to when nothing does. With most of the Netvibes widgets, you can click on the red number indicating items unread and it will mark them all read, but not the POP mail widget. This problem propagates up to the top-level summary of unread items, showing a misleading number any time you leave items in your inbox. An ideal start page will show bright red numbers or other alerts only when something hasn’t, in fact, been addressed already.
4. How much for that lot at the top of the page? The real estate bubble has burst and yet Google’s holding onto the top of the page as though I won’t use them for search if they don’t grab my eye when I first land on the page. Netvibes might be the best of the bunch… displaying my own page title with nary a Netvibes logo in sight. They chose a pleasingly, information-dense small typeface too. Logo/ego displays are not the only screen real estate problems. I found most of the world clock widgets took up far too much space on the space, especially the analog versions. If I want to display times for six different places, all that requires is maybe an eight-character string per location. This should be displayed in a very small amount of space.
5. I am not an animal. I’m human, with human cognitive limitations. Why can’t my start page rearrange data to show me what’s interesting and important? Why doesn’t it incorporate getting things done ideas like next actions? How come workflow is big news in corporations but none of the start pages I tried incorporate anything like it?
6. Inform me, don’t delight me. Some of the pages, notably Protopage and yourminis, seem to think that the most important priority is to visually delight me, with configurable colors, fancy typefaces, and rounded corners on the modules. I prefer Google’s approach to interface design (especially as shown in Google Reader, not on their personalized home page) which eliminates visual junk and focuses on the richness of information displayed rather than the richness of animations or images or color choice.
7. No more tabs, please. My browser has tabs and I know the keyboard shortcuts for them. It’s not efficient to have another set of tabs in the start page. If I want more than one start page, give me different URLs for them so I can put one per Firefox tab. None of the start pages I tried allowed me to turn off the tabs… they always sat there in some prime screen real estate, even though I didn’t care to have more than one page per service.
Some have asked if these personalized home pages represent Portals 2.0. Absolutely not. They have barely progressed beyond My Yahoo! circa 1999. Yes, most of them have open APIs for module development and they’re trying to build active developer communities to create cool widgets. But the platforms themselves aren’t a revolutionary improvement over what we already had.
UPDATE: I wrote yet another post about Ajax start pages on Anne 2.0. That one’s about the economics of attention, monetizing widgets, and the mental pollution that is advertising.
8 Comments
Great insight and recommendations - thanks!
Hey Bill, how funny, I was just emailing you about widgets and Ajax :)
Can we add that you’re also just pushing the integration headaches to the user rather than the server side developer? Maybe this is a newness problem that will start to get handled more gracefully, but so far I see everyone bringing their own JavaScript to the part means: slow JS compile times, multiple poorly handled JS errors, etc. Not a pretty start page after all!
Scott, you’re right… and a lot of the widgets are total crap. They don’t work, they look horrible. I’m all for do-it-yourself assembly of software but the pieces from which apps and portals are constructed need to reach a certain level of good design for anyone to successfully use them.
I kept seeing the buzz build around these and kept wondering what I was missing. I gave up on portals back in the late 90s - they didn’t work well then and they don’t work well now.
Alex, I haven’t given up hope for a portal that helps people be more productive. But the current crop are way too much like early web portals. They need a radical rethinking.
Am I lost cuase, but whats wrong with ajax start pages hey !! www.ajaxshack.com
You might also be interested in a brand new start page available called Funky Homepage (http://www.FunkyHomepage.com). It’s comprised mainly of Google gadgets (as well as Gadgets from other sources), live news feeds (with your choice of news provider), daily Bushisms, daily jokes, horoscopes, videos, weather (up to 5 locations), interactive calendar, Google calendar viewer (for up to 5 Google calendars), comic strips and lots more besides. It also lets you choose your own search engine, colour scheme, etc.
Unlike many of the other personalised start pages available, there’s no need to create an account and it’s all already set up for you, with the most popular gadgets organised by category and sub-category. So there’s virtually no setting-up work required by the user, making it ideal for the mainstream audience and those (like me) who can’t be bothered to do all the work of setting up their own page. More adventurous (and less lazy) users can choose to add their own Google gadgets and RSS feeds, but most people just use the gadgets and tools provided.
Unlike Netvibes, PageFlakes and all the other AJAX powered home pages, Funky Homepage does not use a drag and drop interface. Instead it allows you to select from a drop-down list of the most “popular” gadgets and feeds - “popular” according to the Google gadgets most popular list, that is. As such, it’s not really intended to compete with the flexibility of Netvibes and PageFlakes, but instead is intended to address a gap in the market for those who want something a bit more funky than Google or Yahoo, but without all the setting up required of Netvibes and Pageflakes. So only the most popular gadgets are offered. Although it still maintains a large degree of flexibility for the more adventurous users, allowing them to enter their own feeds and gadgets, should they wish. Whether you like it or hate it, at least it offers an alternative from the plethora of AJAX-powered homepages that are now available.
It’s free to use and you can check it out at http://www.funkyhomepage.com
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[…] Widgets have their benefits, but I’m not totally thrilled with their implementation in the current crop of Ajax start pages. Widgets don’t talk to each other and don’t do a good job of integrating information… they leave that to us and our poor overtaxed brains. Widgets are mostly read-only and that’s a step backwards on what should be the chmod 777 web. Dare Obasanjo knows why companies prefer widgets over data APIs or ad-free feeds: providers of data services would rather provide you their data in ways they can explicitly monetize (e.g. driving traffic to their social bookmarking site or showing their search ads) instead of letting you drain their resources for free no matter how much geek cred it gets them in the blogosphere. […]
[…] tech decentral » Ajax Start Pages Suck good info on things to avoid in Ajax home pages (tags: ajax toread) […]
[…] If successful, we might actually get those widgets that know your time zone without you telling them. That is, software that does the right thing without you rubbing its nose in the steaming pile of righteousness. […]
[…] Ajax start pages suck “They fail to present the information I need in a format that I can quickly grasp. They don’t allow me to do the things I should be able to do from there. They add more work to my life…” […]
[…] Let’s put it another way: developers rightly scoff at “marketing people” giving them technical requirements that the marketing people clearly know nothing about. “We need some WIDGETS in this dashboard! Like in MyFaceSpacr! (Want to connect in LinkedIn?) That’s totally a MUST and ranked as 1.1.0.1! Can you get that in?! OK, I’m off to an IMPORTANT meeting with a ‘customer‘! See ya in 3 months! (”Marketing people” are always busier than you and excited about what they’re saying!) […]
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