Pageflakes - another ‘web’ desktop? But wait!

Posted on February 21, 2006 4 Comments

Sure, Pageflakes is yet another ajax/web 2.0 desktop, but… it supports multiple pages! Finally! I think I just heard an angelic chorus. The holy grail, could this be it? Ok, gushing aside, this one is slick and the (very) key feature that makes it unique is that the desktop is tabbed. You can add tabs, you can delete tabs and, of course, you can name/rename tabs. Ah, bliss. Oops, about to gush some more, must …. restrain… self ….

Signup is simple - pick a username and enter your password twice. That’s it. Thankfully. You’re then routed to your page(s). At first, it is a bit much. There are “flakes”/ widgets / whatever all over the place. And, I must say, there’s quite a variety of ‘em all. So, I closed a bunch and then had a look at the “Add Content” menu. Much to choose from as you see below (and take note of the “Flakes”):
Pageflakes Add

[how about a link to the Flakes Gallery?]

First bad point: What don’t you see in that list? No OPML import option. /whine /cry! And alas, yet another del.icio.us mention, but no Blinklist. But ya know… if I figure this thing out, maybe I’ll have to look into making these flake thingies. The folks at work already think I’m a coder, so maybe I could pull it off!

But look at all the nifty stuff you do see: to-do list, SMS sender, notes (and you can have multiple — just set a title if you want), TV Series (ok, I don’t watch much TV, but I added Grey’s Anatomy because I might be hooked soon…), etc. etc. All good stuff to be sure and, with all those tabs, it is fun to play with many since there’s always more room. No more wacking the “toys” just to make room for another feed. The English / German dictionary is great too. I have a fighting chance of using it to help dredge up 4 years of high school german to converse with Hans at the day job.

So how about the feed reading aspects? Well, I’ve already mentioned that I don’t see an opml import option, so the thought of entering all my feeds is a bit daunting. For purposes of this little eval, I dumped in a handful just to get a feel for how the “reading experience” works. And there I ran into my first real bit of unhappiness. Alas, you apparently can’t read the feeds in Pageflakes. The RSS subscription will present the excerpt portion of an article, if it exists, otherwise you see the title and a “more” link.

pageflakes reader

Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what I’m seeing. But at the moment, this is a major bummer. I need to experiment more as some feeds do seem to show more/all of the article, but others are like the picture above with just the title and “more”.

And speaking of things to look at later, they have some sort of Affiliate Program. The multi-pages thing still has me excited, in spite of the reader experience… if I can figure out how to make the reader experience work I may have to look into this affiliate stuff.

The forums are worth a look. This thread, for instance, mentions OPML import and a more full featured RSS reader yet to come. Ah ha! There’s that angelic chorus again.

For me, and for the moment, I’m definitely giving these guys a bookmark on the toolbar, but until we sort out my feed reading concerns above, I just can’t quite commit. But I really like what I see so far — and yes, I’m remembering that this is a beta. That’s part of the excitement here as there’s just a lot of potential.

Tags: ajax, desktop, pageflakes, web2.0