Two key players in the area of personalized start pages, Netvibes and Pageflakes, have launched new upgrades to their RSS-driven, user-customizable web services.
Netvibes is now offering personalized start pages for big brand name publications and entities. The service, launched under the name Netvibes Universes, lets an entity create a customized landing page for its readership or fan base. To demo the service, the company put together some "Universes" for Time, The Washington Post, and USA Today as well as recording artists like Ice Cube. A newspaper can load its start page up with the RSS feeds from its top stories, blogs or photo feeds. It can also pull in other content, like editor's picks from sister publications as well as localized info like traffic and weather. Each page gets its own unique URL so it can be shared. And, of course, users will be able to customize the branded pages to their own liking, adding their own feeds.
Pageflakes is also rolling out its own initiative centered around shared, customizable pages under the project name "Flurry." Pageflakes users can create a page that serves the common interests of a community, then release it as a public page with its own URL. For example, bands (or a band's fans) could create a news aggregation page that pulls in videos, Flickr photos, news and blog posts, tour dates, maps of the current tour city and so on. Shared pages get their own URLs.
I've seen a recent demo of Flurry, and I must say the new Pageflakes RSS reader trumps the new Netvibes reader. There are a few differences between the services, mostly involving how they are shared, but they are both strong offerings. The uniqueness and innovation on display from both parties will be needed in the long fight against bigger players like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Pageflakes and Netvibes have better start page products than the giants, but since the majority of web users aren't Web 2.0 hipsters, the giants get all the traffic.
