SubscribeYatrack - Ajax personal startpage
Personal startpage has been an important part of next generation web application, as they are no longer just static collection of URLs, but a centralized place to check most of your important data. Yatrack, a local developed Ajax personal startpage, recently caught our eyes, and believed to be the best one in China so far.
Yatrack launched on Sept. 20, 2006. Then it rolled out a major update on Jan. 16, 2007. The product learned a lot from the leader of this market, Netvibes, which has been criticized by some bloggers. But actually we should distinguish learning from copying.
Yatrack really has some innovation parts. I particularly like the RSS reader mode. To enter RSS reader mode, you just click one article link that you want to check the content. In this mode, it has two styles: normal and newspaper. The newspaper style shows all articles from one feeds in one page.
A nice design is the inline web browser that you can check blogs that only publish partial feeds. To activate the inline web browser, you just click the HTML button on upper right corner of the article panel.
Yatrack has a local competitor, Aiddi. In Oct. 2006, Aiddi partnered with Donews to promote its product on Donews personal startpage. But it seems to be a failure partnership. Now the service at Donews has been broken.
Compared with Yatrack, Aiddi is quite a closed system. It doesn’t allow third party developer to add their own stuffs. Also it doesn’t have a feeds reader, just redirect to the original URL when you click on article title. One of the selling point of Aiddi is to monitor webpage without a feeds, a bit like Ponyfish and 580k, which we have introduced. But Aiddi goes a rather questionable way. It just hard copies HTML DIV content from other website.
As we mentioned in the beginning, what makes personal startpage matters is to deal with all important data in one place. That means it should support users to finish some operation within the modules themselves. Just like Netvibes, Yatrack provides flexible API for developers to build stuff for their unique requirement.
Every mini application on a startpage is called a module, which is actually a functional webpage hosted on a public web hosts. The job of the startpage is to render the module in consistent style. Also it provides proxy API so that your module can interact with any web services on the Internet.
Google personal startpage also has developer API. The module from Google is called Google Gadgets. Google Gadgets also heavily relies on Javascript but packed in XML format. I personally use Google startpage. Its feeds reading feature is not as good as Netvibes. But I have some expectation here, that Google will integrate Google Reader with its startpage one day.
As we have said, learning something from these leading service is necessary. The real challenge for Yatrack is to build a developer community around itself like Netvibes and Google have done.
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4 Responses to “Yatrack - Ajax personal startpage”
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…and like Webwag did since Webwag is the sole Start page to pay via Paypal the developpers who create a widget from its API. More on http://www.desk.webwag.com/login.php?redirect=
This is a good technical review and it’s great stuff provided by Yatrack but how those guys plan to monetize their system? Advertisement?
How do you know that “the service at Donews has been broken”? Did you even try?
You might also be interested in a brand new start page available called Funky Homepage (http://www.FunkyHomepage.com). It’s comprised mainly of Google gadgets (as well as Gadgets from other sources), live news feeds (with your choice of news provider), daily Bushisms, daily jokes, horoscopes, videos, weather (up to 5 locations), interactive calendar, Google calendar viewer (for up to 5 Google calendars), comic strips and lots more besides. It also lets you choose your own search engine, colour scheme, etc.
Unlike many of the other personalised start pages available, there’s no need to create an account and it’s all already set up for you, with the most popular gadgets organised by category and sub-category. So there’s virtually no setting-up work required by the user, making it ideal for the mainstream audience and those (like me) who can’t be bothered to do all the work of setting up their own page. More adventurous (and less lazy) users can choose to add their own Google gadgets and RSS feeds, but most people just use the gadgets and tools provided.
Unlike Netvibes, PageFlakes and all the other AJAX powered home pages, Funky Homepage does not use a drag and drop interface. Instead it allows you to select from a drop-down list of the most “popular” gadgets and feeds - “popular” according to the Google gadgets most popular list, that is. As such, it’s not really intended to compete with the flexibility of Netvibes and PageFlakes, but instead is intended to address a gap in the market for those who want something a bit more funky than Google or Yahoo, but without all the setting up required of Netvibes and Pageflakes. So only the most popular gadgets are offered. Although it still maintains a large degree of flexibility for the more adventurous users, allowing them to enter their own feeds and gadgets, should they wish. Whether you like it or hate it, at least it offers an alternative from the plethora of AJAX-powered homepages that are now available.
It’s free to use and you can check it out at http://www.funkyhomepage.com