The AJAX start page is old news....pageflakes, netvibes, Google IG, live.com....it's been done. Yourminis.com is the first Flash startpage I've run across and it's really cool...but I'll never use it (edit: In the current form).
Yourminis.com (from the Goowy.com team) takes fractionally longer to load in my completely nonscientific method of looking at the counter in Winamp. Once loaded the first thing I noticed was the color and the motion. I feel like I stumped into the state fair after a few drinks. There is a lot going on the here. Just like any startpage, you can add tabs across the top to sort your "minis" which can be picked from the left column.
There are plenty of video minis to feed you the latest from youtube and the likes, as well as rss, webmail, flickr, podcasts and etc. The whole things comes together very well and allows you to view some external content inside the Yourminis site, which isn't an entirely new thing but a nice implementation regardless.
Overall the whole interface is very fluid, but I just don't feel "hooked". Maybe flash is overkill for a startpage or just that I don't see anything "new" here to take me away from my trusty old AJAX startpage. Call me old fashion, but I need a little foreplay before getting into all the crazy web 2.0 action.
1 comment:
Thanks for taking a look at yourminis. I wanted to point out a few differences about what we are doing versus traditional start page...
1. The experience is more dynamic and multimedia - giving you more personalization and flexibility. Although you compare it to a drunk carnival - I would say it is more like a mac dashboard - fun and engaging.
2. We have a browser plugin that allows you to access yourminis anywhere - it will load yourminis in heads up mode over an existing page and interact with the content on that page - ie allow you to add individual youtube videos to yourminis, same with microformats, mp3s, etc.
3. We have a different way of sharing allowing you to publish your pages as a direct url or as a badge from your site.
4. In the near future we will also have a desktop client that will be synched with the web.
I would be more than happy to take you through some of the features that make this a very different offering.
Thanks for your support.
- Alex
Post a Comment