Protopage
December 16th, 2005
I used to play with the online version of Post-It Notes. In fact, the were always sitting on my desktop, where chose to constantly ignore them. Useful? Nope. They weren’t interactive enough. I could only just put my notes and nothing else. No weather reports, no RSS, no search engines. Useless.
Netvibes has lead the way in the new “my pages” phenomenon. Built with Ajax, they allow users to play with more than just notes. More customized pages can be created that fit the users needs.
Today, I came across a similar product to Netbives. It’s called Protopage, and has the some of the same bells and whistles as Netvibes, with other nifty features.
+ Users can create more than one page (you’ll see that on the bottom right of the screenshot), which is a bit different than Netvibes in that it’s all built in a non-scrolling atmosphere. Instead of putting less important content on the bottom of Netvibes, just put it on the second page.
+ One can customize the look and feel of Protopage. Change the colors, background, brightness, contrast, and more.
+ Date and Time - a no-brainer, right?
+ All of the feeds that you read are in one panel, and you can mark the entire feed as read and unread, not individual posts. Click on the feed panel and you can read the full text of the feeds (similar to Netvibes)
+ Docked panels - I’m not exactly sure why this is available, but if you want, you can “dock” any panel, which, to me, means that you can put anything in a holding cell for when you need it. I’d just put it on the second available page.
Overall, not as user-friendly as it’s competition, but a few good features had me intrigued. Enough to subscribe to the blog. I also just noticed that Michael Arrington reviewed this tool twice (note to self- check “The Crunch” first), but I’m going to publish this post anyway. Two reviews of a product isn’t a terrible thing.