I never thought I’d see the day. Today I changed my home page from the venerable Yahoo.com to Netvibes.
If you’ve never tried Netvibes, it’s basically what My Yahoo! should have evolved to. Lots of cool Web 2.0 features like dragging modules around, in-page DHTML adding/removing of feeds. It just makes the personalized page experience that much better.
I used to open up Firefox to the familiar view of the Yahoo front page. But I find that it isn’t all that useful for me anymore. Occasionally, I enjoy the interesting headline that shows up, like today’s headline on how much Bush paid in taxes since it is the tax return deadline today. But usually, I don’t even try to read what is on the page. Previously, I also enjoyed seeing the cool ads that popped up. But none of those show up in Firefox and only in IE, which I almost never use.
So today, I resigned myself to switching out my home page to Netvibes, which is a page I look at multiple times a day and has great use for me. Now why not My Yahoo? I used to use My Yahoo, but never set my home page to it. Somehow it just didn’t fit the bill and was too Yahoo content focused. Sure, you can now add RSS feeds. But it wasn’t as nice to work with as Netvibes and I just abandoned it after using it for years as a second home page.
As I pulled up Preferences in Firefox and hit the “Use Current” button for setting the home page, I ruminated on the fact that all the old portals had barely changed: Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Google. All were just rehashes of the same old thing. Just a Web page, some flash, but lots of links, and not feeling very useful to the Web world beyond their own boundaries; I could only get at Yahoo! stuff on the Yahoo! front page.
It brought back some thoughts I had about a year ago regarding portals. None of them had taken into the account the changes in Web surfing behavior; they all basically stayed the same. I thought of all the issues they face, like legacy issues in technology, thinking, politics, fear of change, commitments to partners and advertisers, lack of innovative thinking, closed door protectionist attitudes towards driving traffic to their own services. These are real barriers to what a portal really could be in today’s world. But it also meant for me an opportunity.
If you were to remove all those barriers and start building a portal for today’s Web, what would it look like?