Personalized page is an important strategy for all the portals, as they command the highest degree of stickiness and serve as the default page/starting page for a regular visitor (especially the non-geekies).
Google, after seeing the Aug 2007 spurt is more or less following an organic growth, while Netvibes has registered a decent increase in UUs.
In India, Google is pushing iGoogle via Airtel partnership and is probably using other tactics to increase the adoption.
Sometimes (actually, most of the times) feature parity doesn’t really matter (as many of you tend to think otherwise), and what’s really important is to set the right distribution channel for your app.
What’s your starting page? Do you actually use one?
I use a combination of Netvibes and Google Reader. And you?
iGoogle because my default email is that of Gmail.
There is a widget on NetVibes for gmail, so no need to stick with iGoogle.
I use NetVibes. iGoogle had a temporary glitch (for 2 days) where I couldn’t access it, so I was forced to port over to NetVibes, but having spent a few days on NetVibes I’ve realised that it is more powerful than iGoogle. I keep giving NetVibes feedback in the hope that they keep polishing their product.
I hope more people start using NetVibes. Does anyone know if Google Chrome is just an OS version of iGoogle?
Am a complete netvibes fanboy. Wish they would improve the ability to share stuff easily though
Ravi
You hit the nail right there – I am a big fan of netvibes and really liked the overall interface/usability, but what’s really bad is that one can’t surf beyond the 15 items in a feed..so essentially I use it as a quick way to find out what’s happening, but end up hopping to Google reader
GMail on Firefox, “About:Blank” on IE. I’d hate anything that comes between me and my e-mail.
Bloglines. The non-beta version has a great cache and is fast as lightning in India.
I am BIG fan of Netvibes, but as i go on adding feeds, its became bulky and search is tooo slow. Later it becomes so Swanky that it lost the simplicity eye catching.
So i ended up Famous DeskTop RSS Reader the OMEA RSS Reader. You can read off line too.
Test it and provide ur Feed back.
about:blank
i avoid using any of the bloated homepages wheter igoogle or netvibes or yahoo
they all tend to get bloat after a week of usage.
Netvibes, Use to read feeds and take notes thats it. ANd it works wonderful for my needs.
Hi Ashish,
It’s Naman from Polythought – Startup from Ahmedabad. We just released our homepage product http://www.sitepump.com – Made in India. Can you please review it ? At par with any leading start pages….
Let us know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Naman.
I use a Firefox Pluggin FAST Dial and Tab Effect for this purpose . Though all my feeds are in Google reader and Newsgator .
I’d still prefer GReader over any of the tools – they are more of ‘latest pages’ but not really readers per se (for bookmarking/sharing etc)