30Boxes, one of the best online calendars out there, yesterday launched Webtop, an app similar to personalised starting page Netvibes and Google’s own personal starting page:
The page can be accessed only when you’re already a 30Boxes member, and consists of some information about your appointments (taken from 30Boxes), links to GMail, Flickr, a to-do list and a Google Search module.
While I’m a huge fan of the 30Boxes calendar, I see no sense behind introducing yet another personalised starting page, especially if it holds such a spectacular lack of innovation. Netvibes, in my eyes the best personalised starting page out there, already has a module that lets you pull your 30Boxes feed. In addition to that, Netvibes provides a stunning amount of modules, and recently launched their eco-system, a place to exchange modules and feeds.
As much as I like 30Boxes, I think they should keep their focus on improving the calendar, instead of trying to be everything at once. That’ll only turn them into nothing at all.
Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington (who’s celebrating his blog’s 1st birthday today) writes about it here, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore here.
Richard MacManus chimes in with general observations on the state of the personalised starting pages.
“Specatacular lack of innovation”
Um, not sure how to respond to that one. The webtop was designed as a starting point “view” with no clutter that lets you know what the people within your social network are up to (calendar entries, and blog/photo/myspace posts.
We are interested in making it easy to display and repurpose content from social media and not recreating a traditional portal (ala Netvibes, et. al.)
As far as innovation. 5 minutes after we launched webtop, one of our members updated his firefox plugin so that you can right-click on any image online and set it as your webtop wallpaper. Retro, yes. But also innvoative
Right, I get your point about the starting point view, and while I don’t see the reason for trying to mimic an OSX desktop look in order to do so, I’m convinced.
But I don’t get why you are then incorporating things like GMail, Google search etc. in this “view”, when in reality it should be about 30Boxes and its networking abilities. If what you are trying to achieve with the webtop is a more concise and less cluttered 30Boxes experience, then adding unnecessary things like the above mentioned modules/links seems out of place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that you’re the ones receiving the feedback, so you should know what users want/don’t want, but I personally see no merit in a “view” that can’t decide whether it’s a cat or a dog.
I hope that simile makes sense