September 3, 2006

Personalized Start Page For Organizations


I've always liked one thing about Netvibes: you can create more than one personalized page and share it with other people. Google Personalized Homepage doesn't allow you to do that yet, but Google has teamed up with companies like Dell to provide co-branded start pages.

It seems that you don't have to be a big partner with Google to create a shared personalized page. Google will add to its newly-launched corporate package a personalized start page.

"The personalized start page is a syndicated version of the Google personalized homepage, allowing you to set up dynamic homepages for your users that bring together your content, Google services, and the best of the web.

The personalized start page uses the same technology as the Google's personalized homepage, but lets you create a customized version of the page that is tailored to your users. Combine your own content with additional external content and modules of your choice, and tailor the look and feel of the page with different logos, colors, and fonts. End users of the page still have the ability to incorporate any content from the web, or any Google Gadget, enabling them a degree of customization over the content of the page."

What's interesting is that administrators can add AdSense ads to the page. The personalized start pages will have this address: http://partnerpage.google.com/ig/p/your_domain_name . More at Google's help page, which explains that only selected users can have this feature for the moment.

The start page could be the one-stop place for all the members of an organization: it will mix personal information (mail, news) with corporate information (news, resources) and Google search. A really useful fusion.

{ Via Blogoscoped. }

4 comments:

  1. I love how Google keeps using my ideas. Hahaha. Of course, my ideas became their ideas because I waived my right to them in the NDA during my interview.

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  2. You might also be interested in a brand new start page available called Funky Homepage (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

    ReplyDelete
  3. PageFlakes, Netvibes, and the plethora of other start pages available to consumers. But, you might have noticed something about these products: they're for consumers.

    Check out http://www.phpcow.com/myweb which allowing you to offer those services to your customers or employees

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  4. ya i bought a dell a few years back and the start page in ie was like that out of the box but i just changed default home to google.ie

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