Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Personal Portals

Author:Paul Nakada
Posted:3/12/1999; 4:38:33 PM
Topic:Personal Portals
Msg #:4058 (In response to 4055)
Prev/Next:4057 / 4059

I thought I'd leave some of my thoughts about portals and such. From what I've seen, a lot of sites are adding features like email, todo, and calendar in order to improve their stickiness.

They want to give users everything so that users stay on their site. Why should we as users be tied to one site? From my perspective as a user, this is exactly what I don't want. I want to be able to leverage many different sites, in fact the best of all classes of sites without having to settle for one monolith which does everything, but not necessarily the best.

That's where MyHome http://myhome.netgravity.com/ comes in. I like to call it a "metaportal" It provides a framework to house my personal data like bookmarks, calendar, todo, email, searches, etc but it does not provide any editorial or non personal content at all. In fact what it does do, is try to bring a set of disparate sites together under one umbrella.

My bookmarks are my workflow. I have a set of news bookmarks that i often just cruise right down the list to see what's happening. My work related links and documentation are always a click away, with the actual site that they reside on totally hidden from me.

This is nothing new, but taken a step further, with the newsclipper, things get interesting. i have a set of thirty or so keywords that i'm interested in at a given time. Instead of keying these into My Yahoo or My Excite news clipping services, I have them entered into My Home as my personal news clipping interests. By having them outside of any given news service, I can use the same news clipping keywords on any of the news search engines like yahoo, exite, news alert, totalnews, cnet news, etc.

Same goes for things like contacts. I can choose to map an address from any of the direction/mapping services. It's my choice. Same goes with the meta-search module. a single module with the ability to search any search engine, from yahoo, to bookfinder, to our local corporate database.

I don't mean to plug My Home here. It's basically just something that I built for myself, but have found that others are also interested. What I do want to express is the need for this type of service to be independent of content so that people have choice when choosing which sites they want to use.

Comments?

- Paul

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