After watching the channel 9 video which includes a demo of the upcoming Microsoft Start project it made me realise that portals don’t seem to be investing a lot of effort into allowing users to personalise their homepages anymore.
In the late 90s this was all the rage and offering personalisation was seen to be important if you wanted to lock visitors into your site and many portals like MSN, Yahoo!, Excite and Earthlink put together offerings. I personally have been using My Yahoo! as my homepage for at least 5 years.
But development of these pages has stalled for the last couple of years. I think the only addition to My Yahoo!’s functionality over the last year or so is a RSS reader (still in beta though). Have portals stopped developing personal homepages as search is now king and getting people to use your search engine is seen as more important than locking them into using your content?
It’d be interesting to know what you have as your homepage and why, or what you would like to see on your homepage. My perfect homepage would include the following:
- RSS feeds from my favourite sites
- An option to use my favourite search engines like firefox
- Message centre showing me new emails from my own accounts not just the site providers
- IM integration showing which of my buddies are online
- My bookmarks
- A feed from Blogware showing the latest activity on my blog
- Financial portfolio section
- Synchronisation with Exchange so I can see my calendar etc
- A web2sms interface
