Personalised home pages have
moved up a gear. Wendy Grossman looks at new sites that do all
your surfing for you
MOST heavy web
users long for some way to automate the business of browsing the most
frequently visited sites, either to save themselves time, to save on
phone bills, or simply to ensure they don't miss an important resource.
A few years ago, there was a vogue for offline web browsers. Products
like Web Whacker or Tierra Highlights let you pick a site, specify how
deep you wanted to go in terms of links, and set it going to download
everything onto your hard drive for faster and cheaper perusal offline.
Some of this software is still around. As unmetered, high-speed
internet access slowly becomes a reality, the offline features of such
software become less important, except in the wireless arena. Take a
look, for example, at Avantgo, which has deals with a number of content
providers, including the web magazine Salon.com and the BBC. You pick
the sites you want and it downloads them for you formatted for your WAP
phone, Palm Pilot, or Windows CE device, ready to pass to the device at
the next synchronisation.
These are, however, only limited solutions. The web has become much
more complex in the last few years, and the average web user is likely
to be in the habit of visiting a lot more sites: cinema listings,
weather, bank accounts, ecommerce orders in progress, news headlines.
Large portals like Yahoo!, Freeserve, or MSN have tried to come to grips
with this by letting users create personalised pages that give access to
email and discussion boards as well as stock quotes and news. But these
sites typically work with only a tiny number of content providers that
they have pre-selected as partners. For the average heavy web user,
these aren't particularly satisfying, as the sites you're in the habit
of using are not on their lists.
At least some of the answer may lie in current experiments in
creating metabrowsers, similar to personalised home pages but capable of
much more. What these essentially do is allow you to create a home page
out of content you select from around the web so it can be displayed
quickly and easily at one location.
Quickbrowse is probably the simplest. You enter a set of URLs, and it
gives you back a page with all the content from those addresses in a
long screed. It's not elegant, it's not aesthetic, and it doesn't filter
out ads or big graphics. But it is useful, especially given its email
option: you can schedule the site to send you the content from those
pages by email at regular intervals. For an on-the-road user with
limited web access, this would be a real convenience.
Onepage gives you more sophisticated layout options, based on a
number of existing templates. You should to be able to add any window
you like to your layout, either a URL you type in from the web at large
or one of their preselected content windows, but typed in URLs kept
producing error messages. Non-US Onepage users will also have to work a
little harder for their pages, as standard functions like the weather
report assume you are based in a place with a five-digit zip code.
Octopus is a lot more complicated. Essentially, you build up the page
you want out of elements such as URLs, text, graphics, and so on; more
like using a desktop publishing program. Of all the services mentioned
here, this one is the most difficult to figure out how to use. While the
pages you can build this way are much more sophisticated, because it
depends heavily on Java, actually using the service is very slow (as
measured on an AMD K6 with 128Mb of RAM running Netscape over an ADSL
connection). It does, however, stick an extra button on your browser
that lets you grab any URL you like for placement on your page.
While all these run on the companies' own servers, DoDots gives you
software to download. Thereafter, you create "Dots" out of internet
content you select, with it all winding up in small windows on your own
desktop in the layout of your choice. Like Octopus, DoDots runs rather
slowly. As a service, it's less satisfying than it might be: it depends
on packaged pieces of content on your desktop and seems not to have
enough advantages over an ordinary web browser (after all, there's
nothing unusual about having umpteen browser windows open).
Moreover, which bills itself as "the world's largest collection of
webfeeds" lets you put together a custom page of headlines at its site
or - and this is kind of neat - lets you add five headlines free from
any of their feeds to your own site. Moreover also has a feature called
Newsblogger that makes it easy to add articles with comments to daily
weblogs. For Moreover, the free service is at least partly a way of
advertising its main business, which is supplying customised newsfeeds
to corporates.
Yodlee is probably the most sophisticated of the lot, in that it
allows you one-stop access to all your online accounts. There is, of
course, at least some security risk, in that Yodlee stores for you all
your user IDs and passwords in order to do this. For a lot of people,
however, for whom the alternative is to write down all the varied IDs (a
worse risk), it's got to be a great convenience.
There is, at some point, probably going to be a huge copyright battle
over at least a few of these sites. Cherry-picking the exact content you
want is great for users, but anathema to commercial content providers
who want those users to have to pay in time spent watching advertising.
Obviously, the sites will still get the hits for those pieces of
content, but if these things take off they could threaten at least some
of today's business models for producing content. None of these services
are quite ideal yet, although Quickbrowse's emailed versions and
Onepage's one-click access are powerful features, but they point the way
to a much more personalised web, something that's going to be
increasingly desirable.