Comments on: Should Netvibes/Pageflakes have been Friendfeed before Friendfeed?

By: My 2009 Products I Couldn’t Live Without « These two cents

My 2009 Products I Couldn’t Live Without « These two cents — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:20:53 +0000

[...] social, and Pageflakes and Netvibes from how it’s marketed, screams anything but social. I argued before that Pageflakes and Netvibes should have been Friendfeed, before Friendfeed, and I still [...]

By: Bobby

Bobby — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:26:17 +0000

I read about a site on John Chow’s blog today called http://www.43marks.com – its like Pageflakes and iGoogle but better cuz you can add all your bookmarks and the bookmarks can be websites not just gadgets and RSS feeds although you can upload your favorite RSS feeds too. Its free and totally customizable re-arranging categories and bookmarks in anyway you want. I really do like 43marks much better.

By: emilecambry

emilecambry — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:16:26 +0000

At the end of the day, I am being a monday morning quarterback. I think the interesting takeaway from this is that initially you may not see another company as being a potential competitor in your space, and because the ability to be razor sharp with focus, you can enter someone else’s space fairly easy, and if you do have the big name status, the buzz that you could generate could replace the need for your product.

By: emilecambry

emilecambry — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:07:53 +0000

Justin, I definitely agree with you. I thought that they diluted their message a little bit with some other social components they launched. Especially for Pageflakes that has relatively flat growth over the past 18 months. It could have been an opportunity to differentiate itself from the Netvibes shadow by re-defining themselves in the “aggregated me” space where you can get all of your news and your activities in one place. I just feel that when growth is flat, you have to figure out other ways to draw in the mainstream audience. Right now, it seems like there was a finite amount of people that would use startpages, but a much larger market exists, instead of slugging it out with Netvibes feature for feature for the early adopters.

By: Justin C

Justin C — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:54:19 +0000

I think they could have offered it but I think it would have been diluting the message. In general, people only remember 1 thing about what a company does and I think saying “we do start pages and you can also track your friends activities” might have been too confusing. FriendFeed and twitter benefit from their razor focus which makes it ultra-easy to spread the message and concept.

By: emilecambry

emilecambry — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:40:28 +0000

I think this could have potentially aided in their move to the mainstream much more than their efforts thus far to be more social. They had some of the major elements in their ecosystem: the development community, actual users, and the embedded switching costs in going to another informational gateway. Instead now, I probably could use Friendfeed to read the blogs I care about in more of a timeline format, that’s easily to digest, replacing my need for a startup page. Additionally, what Friendfeed offers is a legit community around the content, and in my Pageflakes, it’s just me.

By: Kristen Nicole

Kristen Nicole — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:33:12 +0000

Good point. Start pages definitely have not reached their potential and have had trouble moving into the social sharing niche.

I wonder if Pageflakes and Netvibes were mainstream enough at the time to make that move, and if they had enough of the community structure in place to pull off a FriendFeed-like structure?

FriendFeed had a bit of a hard time taking off in the very beginning, since it was a newer concept.