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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Mozilla, Browser Tips, web 2.0

Morning Coffee: why do we assume we only get one homepage?

Why do we assume we only get one homepage? For those willing to explore the potential of their browser, we'd like to show you a little out-of-the-box thinking in the form of Morning Coffee.

Though Firefox can set a series of tabs as your "homepage" (select "Use Current Pages" from the preferences menu), this free add-on (shout out to all the free software coders out there) gives you the ability to choose when to open which homepage.

Say, for example, you like to read the NYTimes on days when you work, but you prefer Google Reader on Saturdays and your church's weekly bulletin on Sunday mornings. This program, as you may have already assumed, does just that.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Netvibes Ginger moves into private beta, lets outsiders peek in through the glass

Netvibes has just launched a private beta of its new iteration, Ginger. To those lucky few who were given an invite; now you must know how those kids who found Wonka's Golden Ticket felt. For the rest of us, Netvibes was kind enough to post a run-through of some of their pending and exciting features.

Netvibes has been one of the most popular and easy to use personal start pages for a long while (well, long in internet years; they're like dog years, you know). They offer tons of useful, ready to load widgets. Widgets include eBay, most popular online email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, Facebook, Digg, and many more. You can also insert any RSS feed and set up tabs for different content.

A few features upcoming in Ginger:
  • Added 150 Premium Widgets
  • Listen to your favorite web radio stations through Netvibes
  • 2 GB of free storage space for every registered user

Ginger also looks poised to springboard into the next generation of the social internet. You can tag interesting blog posts, pictures, and video from your Netvibes page and then share them with your friends and family.

The official release of Ginger is in January. For now, you can check out Netvibes current release or visit the Ginger preview page.

[Via Cybernet]

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Blogging, Web services, Google

Google Talk's new gadget

google talks new gadgetGoogle has unleashed a new Google Talk Gadget for use on your Google personalized homepage. The Talk client -- still only available for PC users -- can be semi-enjoyed by Mac users with this new Gadget implementation that resembles what PC users have been enjoying for quite a while, although it adds a few slick features.

The new Google Talk Gadget shares the functionality of the standalone application where users can see contacts online and chat with them, but has the added bonus of not requiring a download, being accessible from anywhere you have a browser and a connection. It's also embeddable into a blog or website with a single line of code.

The best new features of the Talk Gadget enables users to see previews of photos and videos in conversation windows when URL's from YouTube or Picasa Web Albums are pasted into chat windows.

Check out a video presentation of the Google Talk Gadget in action after the jump.

Read more →

Filed under: Web services

Pageflakes plans to add 10,000 flakes (widgets)

Pageflakes
Personalized home page site Pageflakes allows you to customize a start page with flakes (the rest of the world calls them widgets, Microsoft calls them gadgets). Flakes include weather forecasts, email services, calendars, to-do lists, and RSS feeds.

Pageflakes has a repository of flakes, and it's about to get a lot bigger. CEO Dan Cohen says the company plans to offer a directory of 10,000 flakes starting next month. Now the thing about widgets that are embedded in web pages is that there's really only so many things you need them to do. Check your email, get maps, keep up on the latest blogs and news web sites, check stock quotes, etc.

I figure there's maybe a few dozen things I might want in a start page, tops. And once you put those few dozen things on a page it becomes cluttered and hard to read. Pageflakes gets around that problem a bit by providing you with tabs, allowing you to create as many custom pages as you'd like. Use one for work, one for checking stocks, another for reading your guilty pleasure blogs.

Some of the new flakes will let you do things like keep track of other users' MySpace pages or share photos. But still, 10,000 seems like an excessively large number of applications. My bet is that about 9,500 of those flakes will be RSS feeds for various web sites.

Filed under: Web services

Pageflakes: Personalized home page of the moment

PageflakesYep, yet another one. Pageflakes is a personalized home page along the lines of Google Personalized Home, Netvibes, and so on. It's nice and AJAXy as we've come to expect and has a pretty good selection of widgets ("flakes"), including address book, sticky notes, to-do lists, Gmail, headlines, and so on. One nice feature not seen everywhere else is the ability to create multiple pages, which take the form of tabs at the top of the page and let you have multiple sets of widgets organized for, say, Work and Play. It also has a third-party API for creating your own widgets and just now they're sponsoring a widget contest the grand prize for which is an Xbox 360.

Filed under: Web services, Yahoo!

Yahoo! testing new home page design

Yahoo! is reportedly working on an update to its home page, and randomly-selected users are getting a chance to check it out. Screenshots of the new design that have surfaced on Flickr show a home page with the Yahoo! logo shifted to the left (rather than centered, where it has been since the site's debut in 1995) and slightly less clutter, with Yahoo!'s many services moved to a sidebar on the left. Head over to Flickr to see the screenshot for yourself.

Filed under: Web services

ItsAStart.com: Another personalized homepage

ItsAStart.comThe torrent of personalized AJAXy homepages continues. This week's contender is ItsAStart.com, a site with poor punctuation but all the standard features. It has RSS feeds, weather, bookmarks, sticky notes, and a clock. It has a Google Search widget but no others--a shame when other services offer unlimited, custom search boxes. Also, the RSS feeds can be expanded to show entire items, which some services lack. But perhaps ItsAStart's sole stand-out feature is the tag search, which makes a widget that displays an up-to-date feed of blog posts matching your pet tag.

Filed under: Web services

Favoor: Yet another personalized homepage

FavoorBetween Google's Personalized Homepage, Microsoft's Start.com, NetVibes, Protopage, and Goowy, It's getting hard to keep track of all of these personalized homepage services. Favoor is another such service. It works mostly like the others, but as Martin at Tipmonkies points out the only "widgets" allowed are links, RSS feeds, and sticky notes. What, no custom search boxes? It is, of course, packed with AJAX and it's free to sign up.

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