pages

This blog was updated at 1:00 p.m.

Yahoo is vulnerable in yet another corner of its Web network. Over the last year, the Internet company's personalized home page service My Yahoo lost ground to rivals Google and even upstarts Netvibes and Pageflakes, according to data from ComScore via TechCrunch. That loss came even after Yahoo updated its personalized home pages last March.

In January 2008, MyYahoo attracted about 47 million visitors, down roughly 6 percent from the same period a year ago, according to ComScore. In contrast, Google's iGoogle drew almost 22 million in January, three … Read more

PageOnce is a very new take on an old idea. Take your standard widget-based feed reader such as Pageflakes or Netvibes and replace its blog and RSS feed widgets with financial tracking tools to let you keep an eye on bank accounts, credit card transactions, and various bills. It promises to offer you all the things you love about accessing your private personal information, while presenting it like you're scoping out your favorite feeds about gadgets and odd news.

One of PageOnce's best features is that it's very fast, and makes it easy to get going. There's a directory of pre-existing services to choose from, and if you come across one that's not listed you can send in a request for it to be added. I very easily found my bank, phone provider, and various credit card accounts. It also let me add things such as my Facebook news feed, Netflix queue, and mileage number from my airline--something I don't really need to check on a daily basis, but why not add it, right?

Like the service's namesake would suggest, all this action takes place on one page, but you can also cycle through the six major categories (finance, shopping, e-mail, etc.) as you would using self-created tabs on other customizable start pages. The added benefit of going to each of these specialized pages is that the widgets are larger and contain their entire set of data instead of just a brief overview. This was especially useful for my cellular phone bill, which offered up a forecast of how many minutes I was on track to using by the end of the billing cycle, something my carrier doesn't even offer on its billing pages. On the other hand, you can't reorder what's on any of the pages, which is incredibly useful, and will hopefully be added in later versions.

My one reservation with using services like this, and others that deal with financial data (see Mint and Wesabe) are that they just freak me out. There's just something about giving a third party service so much of my personal financial information, that it doesn't matter how secure it is, or how much the data is anonymized on the way there. That said, PageOnce uses a variety of bank-level security measures to keep your data safe including high-level encryption, SSL, firewalls, and vulnerability tests from third party security consulting agencies.

The service is currently in private beta, although we've got 500 invites that have been made available to Webware readers. You can get yours by going here.

[Thanks to Webware reader Kyle for the tip]… Read more

In the process of reviewing a client's Flickr account with my colleague and fellow Searchlight blogger Brian Brown, we noticed that Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to links placed within its Web site. Flickr has been one of the few social-media entities to continue to offer "link juice" from links placed with user-generated content (in this case photo descriptions), making it a viable entity for improving inbound links to a given site.

While it's understandable that Flickr implemented nofollow tags for the exact same reason other social-media sites have--misuse and spamming--it nonetheless marks another step … Read more

My favorite start page, Netvibes, is getting an interesting upgrade. The new "Ginger" version gets social features for sharing your start-page widgets and layouts, as well as a status feed reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter. Netvibes Ginger also makes it easier to add content to your pages.

The site will be updated with the Ginger release in mid-February, but we have some invitations to the private beta now...read down to the end for details.

With Ginger, all Netvibes users get a "universe" page--a public, shared collection of widgets and tabs that anyone can access. Here's a quick example. … Read more

With Google's recent crackdown on Web sites the sell PageRank--which really means selling links--a new era has begun for backlink building. In Google's eyes, links coming into a given Web site from external, quality sites increases that site's PageRank, and therefore its standing in the search engine's eyes. Until recently, there were many sites that had quality in Google's eyes (in other words, they had great PageRank) and also sold links. Anyone could get a piece of that good PR for a price.

Google is now actively lowering the PageRank of sites that deal in … Read more

My dad is a staunch user of MyHQ, which lets you organize your bookmarks in little clusters of text links. While it's highly functional, the service hasn't been updated since mid-1999. Regardless, the big draw is its simplicity, portability, and near-instant load time, which is where Web start pages can really shine over standard browser bookmarking systems.

I've taken a look at quite a few of these sites over the past year, and one I think is good enough to pass my Dad's test is Symbaloo, which like MyHQ is incredibly simple to set up. It also runs fast. Instead of going the route of showing you a live page preview, a la Opera's Speed Dial or Only2Clicks.com (review), Symbaloo lets you organize a smattering of your favorite links in a giant, rectangular grid. Depending on your display resolution, Symbaloo will scale itself to fit, along with providing quick and easy identifiers like site logos or icons to help you organize your links visually. In the center of it all is a search box that can be replaced with about two dozen various search tools that sit beside your bookmarks. You also can manually add more from a provided directory.

In addition to search tools and bookmarks, Symbaloo has a page that puts together links of the top news stories on Yahoo and MSNBC. While this isn't an entirely novel concept in and of itself, the way it's been implemented with stories getting real estate depending on their suggested importance is neat. It reminds me a lot of AOL's Mgnet news service, which launched in July, although with less usefulness considering the stories aren't coming from your saved bookmarks

… Read more

After what felt like a long hibernation period, Google has recently made at least a partial PageRank update of the visible or public PageRank, often referred to as Toolbar PageRank. And boy was it noticed--not so much with the update but with the PageRank drops targeted at sites that were buying and/or selling text links.

A lot has been said already by many who have a much deeper understanding and forecast this event. What I find particularly interesting is how PageRank has become a form of currency, yet who can say what precisely that value is? Of course, I … Read more

If you want to watch a bunch of A-list bloggers and business folks at big-name news sites go a little ape, I recommend observing them when their Google PageRank takes a hit.

According to blogger Andy Beard, a number of high-profile blogs and news sites have had just that happen to them in recent days.

Some examples, according to Beard, include Engadget, which saw its PageRank drop from 7 to 5; Joystiq, from 6 to 4; and SFGate, Forbes.com and WashingtonPost.com, all of which had their PageRank drop from 7 to 5.

What's behind this?

Well, speculation … Read more

Grayboxx is a local recommendations service that's been quietly humming along since 2005. This morning they added 100 cities to the network, bringing the grand total up to 175. Grayboxx takes aggregate customer reviews from all over, and combines them by neighborhood to serve up business recommendations, kind of like what Google has done with its search results. Grayboxx will scour the internet for references to a business (be it tagged photos, or mentions in a blog post), and give that business a certain rank based on its pervasion. However unlike Yelp and Yahoo Local, which are designed and … Read more