Bubbletop: Yet another customizable homepage
You may have thought that there were already enough customizable homepages to choose from. Well, Bubbletop thinks that you're wrong. They are the latest entrant into the customizable homepage market and looking to take a piece of the pie for themselves.
Bubbletop looks a lot like every other customizable homepage that you have seen. Yes, the modules that hold feeds and widgets are bubble shaped, but that's about as far as the differences go. One feature that Bubbletop has which has some potential is its social networking feature. You can be friends with other Bubbletop users and see the content that they have added to their page. Unfortunately there is no feature to automatically add your friend's homepage as a tab on your page. If you want to see any of their content, you have to add each module individually. Additionally, the catalog of widgets that you can add to your page is fairly limited right now since it has not yet seen widespread adoption.
In its current alpha state, Bubbletop doesn't offer any really compelling reasons to switch. The level of customization just isn't quite there yet and there are some bugs that stick out since it's so early in development. I'll keep an eye on this one and see how they progress towards release, but right now you would be better off with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PageFlakes, or NetVibes for your personalized homepage.
Harrison Hoffman is a tech enthusiast and co-founder of LiveSide.net, a blog about Windows Live. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
