Pageflakes: 10 fatal mistakes

I first discovered Pageflakes a few weeks after it launched towards the end of 2005. For anyone not familiar with it - it's a home or start page - a webpage that loads when you launch your browser. It's possible to add links, search engines, RSS feeds and hundreds of widgets to enhance the time you spend on the web. It's got over 250,000 of these widgets, and people can also publish their own pages directly on the web for other people to view and use - over 130,000 of them in fact.

It was a very smart looking resource - very flexible, very simple to use and highly innovative. While there were other resources around that did much the same thing, such as Netvibes and iGoogle they have never been able to offer quite the same level of functionality. However, even if they had been, I would have been inclined to stick with Pageflakes because the management team talked to their users. They had an active forum, a Facebook page and so on. They would ask questions of the users, they set up a small group of beta testers and developed the product in conjunction with the feedback they got. In April 2008 it was sold into the Live Universe consortium, run by Brad Greenspan, and immediately things at Pageflakes started to take a turn for the worse.

Clearly Brad Greenspan isn't the sharpest tool in the box. In fact, I'd go so far to say he's a complete idiot (I'd like to say more, but this is a safe for work blog, though if you're reading Mr Greenspan, please feel free to drop me an email and I'll explain to you in detail why you shouldn't be left in charge of any sort of company), since he's failed on just about every level. All communication between Pageflakes and their users quickly started to dry up. The last entry from a Pageflakes team member to their Facebook page was back in July 2008 for example, and the team of beta testers never heard a word at all. Communication on the forums also ceased. Greenspan and his team were clearly unable to work out that the main strength of any Web 2.0 based resource are the users. Meanwhile Netvibes was going from strength to strength, with new versions, lots of communication and technical support responses within 24 hours - all told very impressive. Brad Greenspan's second mistake - ignore what the competition is doing.

His third mistake (I'll keep counting, because there are a lot of them) is to stop improving the product. Well, I suppose he was using the Google technique - buy up a product and then doing nothing with it. Suggestions went by the board, but Pageflakes is a very robust product; extraordinarily stable in fact, so that wasn't too much of an issue. At that point I still felt quite happy to suggest to people that they use the product, though I was also suggesting that Netvibes and iGoogle were worth looking at as well. By then I'd started to really ramp up my own Netvibes page.

Towards the end of 2008 came the first of what I would regard as the killer blows to the service; there was a long period when a lot of users were unable to connect to the service, and 'long period' is days, not hours or minutes. Understandably people were upset by this and a large number complained and left to join Netvibes. Mistake number four; you have to provide a stable service for people to use, whatever the cost. Very little by way of apologies on Pageflakes own forum, with one poor tech guy (who seems to be the only one left) taking the flak and trying to apologise. Mistake Five - hiding behind junior staff and not having the guts to talk directly to users.

If this wasn't bad enough, Pageflakes users who still remain, but who are getting understandably concerned and more than a little ticked off go into the service one day to see a huge advert plastered over all their pages. The advert can't be moved or minimised. Mistakes Six and Seven - don't launch things without warning users, and don't introduce things users have no control over. If you were one of the users you'll know what happened next, and if you're not, you can work it out rather better than Brad Greenspan - users went through the roof. The second tranch of users walked at this point, having made their point in the forum and on the Facebook account. Several made the point that they were happy to help Pageflakes, and realised that the resource needed to make money - but simply whacking advertisements onto the page without any discussion with users really wasn't the way to go. The advertisements disappeared after a couple of days, but by then the damage really was done. The Pageflakes team had made their opinion quite clear - the resource was nothing more than a cash cow, the users their mealticket and nothing else. Mistake eight - treat your users with contempt and they're out the door.

Pageflakes continued through December and into January in an unstable mode; sometimes available and sometimes not - at least only for hours this time rather than days. Pageflakes went down again a couple of days ago. According to CNET it's because Pageflakes and associated resources are being moved to new servers. If this was planned wouldn't it have made sense to actually inform users, and provide some information on a holding page, rather than what's happened which is to look as though the service has disappeared - and I'm still not entirely convinced that it hasn't. Mistake nine - not to plan ahead, tell users what is going to be happening and keep them involved in the loop.

I find it astonishing that this bunch of idiots were in a position to buy the product in the first place - clearly they're unable to run it properly. If you think I'm bitter about it, you should take a look at the comments flooding onto Twitter about the situation; of course, no-one from Pageflakes is on Twitter, which is Mistake ten - not going to where the conversations are, so being unable to reassure or firefight.

So - is Pageflakes actually dead and buried? Or will it rise up once ported across to the mythical servers? I think I can safely speak for the majority of people who have used the system when I say 'Who cares? If the management team at Pageflakes doesn't care about the users, why should the users care about them?'

If you want an alternative to a once great service that has gone to the dogs I would suggest taking a look at my list of Start Pages though I suspect that most people will now move to either Netvibes or iGoogle.

Comments

[Formerly Happy Pageflakes User]

Phil,
Thanks for your update about what is happening with Pageflakes. There certainly isn't much information out there even acknowledging it is down.

Wanted to point out that your list of start page services still lists Pageflakes as your favorite.

[Phil Bradley]

Thanks for the comments. Yes, I know it's still listed as my favourite. In many ways, it still is, which is why I'm so annoyed. The resource is great - the management team are rubbish.

[D Diehl]

Well...this isn't the first time a great product has been destroyed/rapped/pillaged/abused/ignored by a someone who's only interest is short-term dollar.

Phil, thank you very much for the information, opinion and frankness.

I guess I should go look at NetVibes now... :)

[Stinger503]

Hello,I agree with you. I left My Yahoo! after it became outdated (I couldn't update my sports teams for example) and then went to iGoogle which somehow caused windows to keep popping up and my computer crashed (I spent a week reinstalling things including Vista). So I went to pageflakes (tried out netvibes too). At first I thought maybe I missed the memo on this "outage" but it's pretty clear that isn't the case. Now I'm back at My Yahoo! (they updated since I left). Weird to end up where I started.

[Another very unhappy former Pageflakes user]

Thanks Phil for the information. I wish I'd not relied on it so much and used an alternative start page - stupidly I didn't and now have days of work ahead of me to recreate a similar site on NetVibes (hope I can trust them!):-(

[A slightly happier (former) Pageflakes user]

Just to let anyone interested know that I just managed to access Pageflakes again - and am printing out all my pages as I type! I won't be lulled into a false sense of security again though...

[Shafqat]

Hi Phil - very well thought out post. Good management training for any startup founder out there.

We're relaunching a completely new version of NewsCred in a couple months, and it'll have a lot of the features that you loved at Pageflakes. We'd love to get you involved early by trying it out if you are interested in helping us build the product. Will get in touch.

Cheers,
Shafqat (cofounder of NewsCred)

[Ole Brandenburg]

Phil, believe me it's heartbreaking to see what happened to Pageflakes. Christoph has written an excellent review on his blog and I share his view. I think what made Pageflakes strong in the beginning was the combination of a good product with "real" customer care. We actively reached out to users, asked for the feedback and tried to implement it. Of course, only a fraction could be released but still - the philosophy of being user orientated was always strong.

Unfortunately, the new owner and management team of Pageflakes is (for what ever reasons) not able to at least maintain a certain level of support. It hurts me to see that (and read all the user feedback) but at the same time it would be hypocritical of me to say we would have done it better. We had the chance to build the product and we, too, did not manage to get there - hence the acquisition by LiveUniverse. In the end all this doesn't mean much for Pageflakes' users today since they simply want a reliable service. Very sad indeed that not even that can be provided. And for that I don't think there's any excuse.

Thanks for being such a loyal and active Pageflakes user for such a long time Phil.

Cheers
Ole