Long time no blog

I warned you in my very first posting that I'm lazy about writing and that I didn't know how frequently I would post something. But four months without a posting, I didn't know that I'd be that bad! I probably chose the worst possible timing for starting a blog, since I started it around the same time when we founded Pageflakes.

Trying to become the #1 startpage in the world doesn't leave you a lot of time for anything else. :-) But I should at least give you a little update on what's been keeping me so busy:

• Hari K. Gottipati of O'Reilly and Barbara Krasnoff of InformationWeek just picked Pageflakes as the Ajax king in the "webtop" category - ahead of Google and Microsoft. Read the story here and here (And after that, digg it!)
  
  
• About two weeks ago we released our all-new RSS reader. The new version lets you read all your favorite blogs and needs feeds in one window and offers various different views to meet everyone's individual reading habit.
  
  
• You can now customize your page even more by choosing from different color schemes and changing the number of columns.
  
  
• Maybe the coolest of all features, we've recently added the ability to share pages with selected friends as well as to make pages public.
  
  
• In addition we've added numerous flakes, bringing the flake count close to 100. For example, you can now read and write emails from your startpage with Mail Flake; watch videos with Metacafe Flake, Revver Flake and YouTube Flake; keep track of your social network with openBC Flake, and so much more. Check them out in our Flake Gallery.

Despite these new features, please keep in mind that we're still in beta and that we haven't even delivered 5% of what we plan for the future. Back to work - see you at my next posting, presumably around Christmas! ;-)

The Hottest Web 2.0 Betas

The "Museum of Modern Betas", a site that is dedicated to keeping track of all those new Web 2.0 apps that are popping up every day, added a great resource to its site: The hottest betas in the webosphere. The list is based on the number of bookmarks at del.icio.us added within the last 7 days, which is a really interesting parameter. Pretty interesting for everyone who tries to discover successful startups before everyone else does (VCs, journalists,...).

Pageflakes wins Web 2.0 Award

Quoting from Ole's blog:

Yes, we do know that there are quite a few awards out there. Yes, we do also know that some of them are not very well researched and show little depth. However, SEOmoz.org has certainly raised the bar in terms of depth and research quality. Over the past few months they have analized hundreds of Web 2.0 sites - and Pageflakes has won the award for best Start Page! Google personalized pages came second, live.com (Microsoft) came third. You will find a detailed list and all the winners (and runners-up) at http://web2.0awards.org/.

Thanks to Kat Ortland who has been the driving force behind the research. We hope that you enjoy Pageflakes as much as she does.

Pageflakes Server Problem

Some famous people lend their names (which for some reason always start with an "M") to laws which we all love (Moore, Metcalfe). And then there are guys like Murphy.

To make a long story short, due to Murphy's Law and an insane amount of bad luck (what is the probability of two HD crashes within two days?), Pageflakes has been down or very slow for most of the past 48 hours. Needless to say, we're working like crazy to bring the site back.

We've very sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for your understanding and your patience!

Dream job for a Web savvy student

Christian Leybold of BV Capital just posted a job opening to his blog. He's looking for someone to help him research young Internet companies. If you're serious about Web 2.0, it basically means you're getting paid for what you're doing the whole day (and maybe the whole night too) anyway. If you think you might fit the requirements, go ahead and apply. I'm sure you'll like it.

ZDNet reviews AJAX desktops

ZDNet's Richard MacManus reviews the AJAX desktop space. About Pageflakes he says:

Just released earlier this month, but potentially Pageflakes will be the most open of all the AJAX homepages. It offers standard modules (which it calls "flakes") like blogs, news, search, note, Flickr, Del.icio.us. There are more modules in development by Pageflakes, third-party developers and "content partners". It's developer page lists a broad range of options for developers to build modules, so this is a promising start by Pageflakes. [...]

Among the smaller companies, Pageflakes seems to be the most promising with its API support. [...]

He also writes about the same topic on his (must-read) ReadWriteWeb blog. Among other things, he has a look at the Alexa traffic charts of the different players. One of his interesting observations is this:

Update: A source at Microsoft tells me that the Live.com figure on Alexa may include mail.live.com, which gets a lot of traffic. If that's the case, take the following paragraph with a grain of salt...

I recently noticed that Live.com, while unsurprisingly having much more traffic than the start-ups, isn't bookmarked more frequently than Netvibes and Pageflakes on Del.icio.us. I was wondering if Live.com may have a lot of traffic (very easy to achieve for Microsoft) but few real users who actually bookmark the site and come back? Richard's observation might be an explanation for the discrepancy between the Alexa numbers and the Del.icio.us numbers. Maybe Del.icio.us bookmarks are a better proxy to guesstimate another site's user base than Alexa after all?

New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors

cIf you have a website or even run an Internet startup, you should pay a lot of attention to your new visitors vs. returning visitors ratio. After all, you want to make sure that you're able to retain your customers. If you're fortunate enough to have a Google Analytics account, you won't overlook this parameter as it is shown on the first page of this absolutely awesome (and free) traffic analyzer. But what percentage of returning visits should you strive for? If you have no answer to that question, you may not able to draw any conclusions from the numbers.

Is 100% a good value? Of course not. It means you're not acquiring any new visitors. 0%? Not good either, since you're not able to retain your visitors in that case. So the answer must be somewhere between >0% and <100%. If this sounds like a non-statement to you, are you sure that you wouldn't have instinctively answered "as high as possible", asked about the optimal percentage of return visits? :)

To be honest, I don't know the correct answer to that question either (but I will look into it, and if you run a website maybe you should too!). In fact, there's not one single correct answer, as it depends on several factors such as "how often does a good customer of your site visit the site per week?". And these factors differ for different businesses.

Maybe the question is rather academic (but I still find it interesting). Common sense tells you that you must look at several parameters to draw good conclusions. If you look at your overall traffic stats, you should be able to tell if a rising return visit ratio is a sign of increasing customer retention or just a sign of sluggish new user acquisition.

"Online Ajax 'desktops' try to change the rules of the game"

ZDNet has a really neat introduction into the AJAX Desktop space:

Online Ajax "desktops" try to change the rules of the game

Written by Dion Hinchcliffe, the article lists some of the reasons why AJAX Desktops are so compelling. And of course I'm happy that just a week after our Beta Launch, Pageflakes is already recognized as "one of the best offerings" by a proven Web 2.0 expert.

New Pageflakes feature: Multiple pages

Did you notice that too? If you add some flakes and feeds, the page quickly beomes pretty crowded. One page simply doesn't offer enough space to accommodate all those useful flakes and feeds. The obvious answer: Let users have multiple pages.

Thanks to out extraordinary development team we just added this feature, and I think it's really neat. For example, you can create one page related to your job, another one for your family and yet another one for your hobby. Play around with it a little, I'm sure you'll like it!

BTW, we also added a new Map Flake based on MSN Map. Check it out!

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.

Pageflakes Releases Public Beta

We're thrilled to announce the release of our Public Beta! Over the past weeks, we fixed many bugs and glitches, implemented numerous improvements, added support for Firefox and created a number of really nice flakes. Thanks to all users and developers who provided us with their valuable feedback!

Pageflakes now features:

• Address Book: Manage your contacts right from your personal startpage that you can access from anywhere.
• Price Comparison: Start price comparisons using a variety of different comparison shopping engines like Shopping.com and mySimon. Also features price comparison engines from the UK and Germany.
• Flickr: This one can make your page look beautiful. Select photos by tag, date or Flickr user.
• Alexa Traffic: Keep an eye on the traffic of up to five sites.
• Web Search: Start Web searches using Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com. Look for Web pages, images, news or Usenet discussions.
• Dictionary: Title says it!
• Note: A simple notepad, like a digital version of Post-it® notes.
• To-Do-List: You can set up multiple lists and tasks and receive reminders by email. Really helps you to get things done.
• GMail: Keep track on incoming mails to your GMail account.
• Become.com Shopping Search: Start shopping searches using Become.com.
• Movie Find: Quick access to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and RottenTomatoes.com.
• What’s Next on BBC: For our visitors from the UK.
• Zoho Writer Docs: Access your Zoho Writer documents right from Pageflakes.
• Yahoo! Weather: Enter your ZIP code and get the current local weather plus a forecast.
• Del.icio.us: Your Del.icio.us bookmarks on Pageflakes.
• SMS: Send a free text message!

...and the list goes on.

In addition to that, of course you can also subscribe to news feeds and blogs. This is implemented in a very simple way so far, but a full-fledged RSS reader is coming soon.

We hope you enjoy the site! If you like it, recommend it to your friends. When you check out the site, please bear in mind that this is still a Beta Version. So, please forgive any inconveniences, and let us know if you experience any bugs.

OK, I gotta go back to work. Many new features and improvements are under way. :-)

eHub Interviews Pageflakes

Read it here

FON + Skype + Netgear = Trouble for BigTelco

Skype announced that it invests in FON, the P2P WiFi company I blogged about earlier. Add to this new PC-less Skype phones from Netgear, Creative and others (see a posting of Christian Leybold from BV Capital) and you have the ingredients for some major trouble for the traditional telco business.

Of course, this is not new. Skype alone is an incredibly disruptive force. But the flood of new products and services centered around Skype shows just how strong the creative destruction is which Skype has triggered. I'm not saying that the big telcos are doomed. But they must find new cash cows - selling long-distance minutes at high prices will become increasingly difficult.

I'm up for the challenge, Mike! :-)

I already knew that Mike Arrington is very sceptical about AJAX desktops like Pageflakes.

Today I learned that he is similarly sceptical about online calendars like CalendarHub:

Ajax calendars are faily commonplace now (they are kissing cousins to Ajax home pages as far as I’m concerned) and seem to be breeding just as prolifically.

So, one of the most influential persons from the Web 2.0 world basically says that the two startups I'm involved with are doomed.

What should I say? Maybe just this: I'm up for the challenge, Mike! :-)

P.S.: I know that Mike wishes every startup success, so I know that while he fears we may fail he doesn't hope so.

Pageflakes nearing launch

We’re getting closer to our Public Beta in large steps. Here’s a little update:

• Pageflakes can now be viewed with Firefox and Opera. You might still experience a bug though. Please forbear with us – we’re working hard to offer 100% Firefox, Opera and Safari support ASAP. It won’t take long until we’re done.
• We created a really cool Address Book Flake. We tried to keep it simple (in a 37signals kind of way) and I’m very happy with the result. We will add some more very useful features to this Flake in the future (e.g. import/export and printing of contacts), but we’ll make sure that usability won’t suffer. Check it out!
• Another really cool new module is our To-Do-List Flake. It allows you to manage multiple To-Do-Lists, set due times and receive email reminders. When a task is done, tick the checkbox and it’ll be stroked-through. Hit “delete” and it will be removed completely. Simple! This comes very handy for people like me who lose everything they write on paper and who’re thus trying to put every bit of information online.
• Thanks to our fantastic Community Developers, we’ve been able to add several applications from independent developers already, just five weeks after the Developer Release: My personal favourites include the Del.icio.us Flake, the Movie Finder Flake and the Bushisms Flake, but be sure to try and enjoy them all. You’ll find them under “Add Content”.
• Together with the folks over at AdventNet Inc., we created a little module that lets you access your Zoho Writer documents right from your personal startpage. Pretty handy. Thanks, guys!
• Many glitches fixed, but still some to fix before we can launch the site big.

Many new exciting flakes are in the works – by our own developer team as well as by Community Developers and companies we’ve partnered with. So, stay tuned!

If you check out the site, please bear in mind that we’re not in Public Beta yet. So, please forgive any inconveniences, and let us know what you like and what you don’t like.

Pandora's Box

Most readers probably know Pandora, but maybe there are still some who don't. Pandora is a wonderful music service that lets you listen to a music selection tailored to your taste. You start by entering the name of a band or a title that you like. Pandora then starts playing songs of a similar style. You can rate any song you hear to educate Pandora about your taste, so over the time the selection becomes better and better.

You can read a little bit about the underlying magic here. I assume in addition to the results from The Music Genome Project they utilize collaborative filtering (like Amazon's "if you like this book, you may also like these books" feature) so that the service will automatically become better as more users use it. I still don't know exactly how it works, but it seems to work pretty well. I like the majority of the songs suggested by Pandora and stumbled on great music by bands I never heard of before. So either it works, or I'm such a philistine that you could play any song to me and I'll like it.

In any case you should try it. Amazingly, it's even free.

$22,000,000 per employee

Yesterday Piper Jaffray rose its price target for Google to $600, reminding me of Henry Blodget's famous Amazon.com recommendation in the dot-com frenzy days. At today's close of $445.24, Google's market cap is about $131.6B, with an enterprise value of about $121.0B.

Divide that by 5,500 employees (5,000 as of September 30, 2005 - the rest is just a guess), and you get $22M for every employee. Not bad! I'm wondering if any public company ever achieved a higher value per employee. Does this mean that Google is overvalued? No. Maybe it is, maybe it's not - I don't know.

"Want to Go Office-Free?"

This is what AP Business Writer Allison Linn was asking herself. To get an answer, she decided to spend one week relying as much as possible on free Web services for everyday business tasks.

The result of her experiment:

For now at least, Microsoft is right -- these challengers will complement, not replace, my Microsoft Office software.

I think she's right. MS Office is such a large and powerful suite of applications, and some applications lend themselves better to being webified than others. For example, despite a good Web-based spreadsheet application like Num Sum, I won't trash Excel anytime soon. (This doesn't mean that Num Sum isn't perfectly suitable for a large number of use cases. It may also be a good alternative for occasional users or people from developing countries who don't want to spend money on Excel.)

For a counter-example, I think calendar software is an application type which is perfect for webifying. I can't think of anything which a desktop calendar can do which an online calendar can't, and the advantages of turning your calendar online are obvious. So maybe it's just consequent that my favorite quote from the article is also about online calendars:

My overall favorite turned out to be CalendarHub, which easily imported four years worth of calendar data into a pleasing interface and -- like several out there -- offered handy e-mail reminders of upcoming events.

Seems like she agrees with Dion Hinchcliffe, who named CalendarHub as the best Web 2.0 application of 2005 in the calendar category. Another interesting thought I stumbled upon:

Also, although it is nice in theory to be able to access data online, in practice it often took longer to log on to different applications every time I needed something, rather than just opening a file on my desktop.

That's right, Mrs. Linn. This is one of the reasons we're creating Pageflakes. Our plan is that some time in the not-so-distant future, Pageflakes will allow you to access all your applications and all your data conveniently from one page. When you can carry your applications to the Web, why leave your desktop behind?

Full Disclosure: I'm affiliated with CalendarHub and Pageflakes.
Promise: Less self-promotion in my next posting. ;-)

The Whole Web at Your Fingertips: Introducing Pageflakes.

I’m exceedingly happy to announce Pageflakes, my new startup.

Pageflakes will start as a personalized startpage (a.k.a. AJAX desktop) that allows you to read blogs and other RSS/Atom feeds, check your email, get the latest sports news and stock quotes, start Web searches and use services like Del.icio.us or Flickr, all conveniently accessible from any PC and from one page. I’m sure there are at least 5-10 sites that you check every single day, in fact probably several times a day. Pageflakes saves you some of this effort by aggregating the content that’s relevant for you into one nice page. A bit like an RSS aggregator, only that it’s not limited to RSS feeds.

But that’s only the beginning. Over time, we want Pageflakes to evolve into THE entry point to your digital life, allowing you to do everything from managing to-do lists to watching Internet TV to checking your voice mailbox and much more. A suitable name for that might be Digital Life Aggregator (similar to the term “Digital Lifestyle Aggregator”, which AFAIK was coined by Marc Canter) or Next Generation Internet Services Platform (a term recently used by Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie when talking about Microsoft’s new Live.com initiative).

If that sounds familiar to you, the idea of a personalized startpage has been around for years. Excite and Yahoo tried it several years ago, but we think it takes new technologies and approaches like AJAX, RSS and APIs and other Web 2.0 ideas for this concept to really take-off. Thanks to AJAX you’ll get a desktop-like experience. Thanks to widespread content syndication you’ll be able to add an incredible variety of content and services to your personal page. To make the Web 2.0 buzzword compliance, we also address The Long Tail of software by allowing developers to contribute their applications to Pageflakes.

We just launched our “Developer Release”, so right now we’re not even in alpha yet. However, if you go to our site you can already see some prototype modules (“flakes”) and enjoy some AJAX Drag & Drop goodness.

When you look at the site, please don't forget that we’re pre-alpha. 99% of the functionality is still missing, the design implementation is not perfect yet and there are still some glitches. Basically we're at a point where others put up a teaser page. Once we target the general public, we will also support Firefox, of course.

Finally, if there’s anything that I’m more excited about than the idea itself, it’s our team. It includes someone who co-founded Alando.de (which was acquired by eBay) and an exceptional team of oustanding software engineers from Bangladesh. I think this posting is too long already, so I’ll talk some more about my partners on a later occasion.

Now have a look at Pageflakes, subscribe to the launch notification and let me know what you think!

P.S.: “Are you kidding me? Do you really want to compete with mighty Microsoft and Google?” Well, in a way we will. In the beginning, Pageflakes, Live.com and Google’s Personalized Homepage will look pretty similar. But over time, we expect the three to develop into somewhat different directions. We’ve got a hell of a lot of cool ideas on how we’re going to improve and extend Pageflakes in the future (and I’m sure so do the other teams – but we probably don’t have the same plans). In addition, our advantage as a small startup is that we’re quick, that we can flexibly react to the needs of our users and that we’re totally focused on what we’re doing. Finally, we’re not saying that we will drive Live.com or Google/IG out of business. There’s space for more than one player in this emerging market, and we’re satisfied if we get a sizeable chunk of it.

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005

Dion Hinchcliffe put together a great list of the best Web 2.0 applications released in 2005. Interestingly, only one of about 30 applications has been developed by a big corporation (Microsoft's Start.com) while the rest has been developed by start-ups - some of them tiny one- or two-person companies. As far as Web 2.0 is concerned, the greatest innovations still come from start-ups (although the GYM is close, as demonstrated with software like Google Earth and the new Yahoo! Mail).

So far, two from the list have been acquired by one of the big boys: Flickr and Del.icio.us. I'm sure that in a year from now, a couple of others from the list will have been snapped up. My best guesses are Writely and Netvibes.

Congrats to Sam (Writely), Tariq (Netvibes), Ian (Openomy), Jason (Writeboard and Ta-Da-List) and to everyone else who's working on the next generation of Internet software.

Last but not least some sites I'd suggest to add:

• CalendarHub (how about adding a "calendars" category, Dion?)
• TailRank (Blog Filters)
• Reddit (Peer Production)
• NumSum (maybe add a Web Excel category?)

My favorite quote on the Ya.hoo.licio.us acquisition

I still can't believe Yahoo paid around $100 for my bookmark list.

From Greg Yardley