One of the strongest players in the Ajax start page arena introduced some new features to its service Thursday.
Pageflakes' new launch, nicknamed Blizzard (flakes, snow, blizzard – get it?) features new customization options, more ways to share your custom page creations and better support for Safari on Mac OS X.
The dynamic web page service niche has been quite active lately. This relaunch from Pageflakes follows recent overhauls of other offerings from the likes of Yahoo, Netvibes and Google. All of these services offer lightweight pages that users can load up with widgets – RSS feeds, video players with integrated search, calendars, and image browsers, to name a few possibilities. Pageflakes offers a gallery of roughly 240,000 such widgets, known in its ecosystem as "Flakes," mostly created by users or business partners.
One of the major changes in this release is the introduction of fully customizable themes. If you're a Pageflakes user, look for the big yellow button in the top right corner of your start page. You can also upload photos, pick colors and develop your own skin for your page. The less adventurous can simply select one of about 25 new themes on offer – check out my grassy theme above.
Along with Blizzard's release, Pageflakes has also announced a series of partnerships with major media outlets. Slate, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, CNN and CBS television have all developed custom Flakes and unique custom pages filled with their content. These sharable custom pages are called "Pagecasts," and, as their name implies, they can be shared publicly among Pageflakes users. After adding a Pagecast to their start page, Pageflakes users can customize it further by loading it up with whatever flakes they want. Users can create thier own Pagecasts, and they can make them group-editable as well.
For a full list of the upgrades, check out the Pageflakes blog.
