Pageflakes, a start/home page resource has been down for about 24 hours or so now. It's a little bit too early to call it finally dead since it's been out for about a week in the past. However, I think this may be a final nail in the coffin. I'm surprised that there are still people who use it as their main home/start page, given the superiority of Netvibes, but there's no accounting for taste. I wrote a post in January of last year, Pageflakes - 10 fatal mistakes which still seems pretty accurate to me.
If you don't like Netvibes, my Web 2.0 applications page has a listing of another 30 resources that you might like to explore.
I really liked bubbleshare for photos but it too died. I'm also not crazy about netvibes. While I use igoogle for a personal home page there is need for better stuff than can be shared. Also, since wetpaint killed their free to educators wikis, we are left with wikispaces, which is full of problems. Anyone out there from the web2.0 world listening?
Posted by: Al | June 06, 2010 at 02:52 AM
I'm one of those still using Pageflakes. If they are dead, then a little announcement about closing it down would have been appreciated. I just haven't gotten around to moving 100+ feeds scattered across a dozen tabs since there is no OPML export !!!!
Posted by: eric | June 06, 2010 at 11:24 PM
Thanks not how Pageflakes works I'm afraid Eric. They regard their users simply as cash cows - that's why they just dumped advertising on pages without consultation, why the blog hasn't been updated in 2 years, why their forums are dead. Such a shame - when it was owned by the people who created it, it was great. Then it got sold and that was it.
Move to Netvibes - it's a far superior product IMO.
Posted by: Phil Bradley | June 06, 2010 at 11:32 PM
Looks like PF is back now, but you're right. I set up my Netvibes account and will be moving asap. PF was nice because it's the only site like that that isn't blocked by my company so I can use it at work too.
Posted by: eric | June 07, 2010 at 01:17 PM
Indicative of the attitude of Pageflakes the company towards its undoubtedly dwindling number of users: Pageflakes blog last post 22 July 2008; Pageflakes Corporate Site Press Center last press release May 2008; Pageflakes Support Forums last post 17 March 2010. Pageflakes has been down for the past four days and not one word of explanation, no apology, no communication whatsoever. It suddenly re-appears, again no explanation, no communication. However do they plan to survive if they treat their customers this way?? But nothing new there, they have been consistently terrible in that respect for a number of years. I moved to Netvibes of course many moons ago, though I still retain a Pageflakes page in a work capacity if only as a backup (have to now revisit that decision) and one in a personal capacity if only because their particular flake 'Web Site Clipper', allowing me to bring my favourited webcams together in one place), does not have a Netvibes equivalent. So they are hanging on to me by a thread, and the thread is wearing pretty thin now.
Posted by: Eddie Byrne | June 07, 2010 at 11:35 PM
This may or may not work, depending on the resource, but if flakes are public you can take the widget's HTML coding and put it into Netvibes. While I was crossing over I did that with a lot of Pageflakes stuff - though it's a bit weird looking at Pageflakes widgets IN Netvibes!
Posted by: Phil Bradley | June 07, 2010 at 11:52 PM