Pageflakes

Pageflakes is sort of a "roll-your-own" portal service. When I first visited the page in Firefox (my "school" browser), it presented a bunch of widgets customized for Philadelphia: weather, news, sports, the usual. When I tried to change my location to Princeton, it presented me with an error, so I shrugged and surfed off elsewhere.

When I came back to Pageflakes later, though, it brought up results for Princeton after all. I should note that ALL of this was done without even having to register; no doubt Pageflakes uses cookies for this sort of thing.

The wigdets (or "flakes") cover a range of different news sources (old media and new)...newspapers, CNN, Digg, ESPN and CBS Sports for sports, among others. There's weather, local news headlines, movie and tv listings. If you click on the menu button at the top right of the screen, it pulls up a list of more widgets you can add; the "Fun" category includes MySpace, Facebook, horoscopes and "Hot or Not?" There are also non-internet content widgets of the sort I find as part of my Mac OS X operating system like world clock. You can create a blog or check e-mail, or import your Del.icio.us bookmarks. Adding a "flake" is very simple, though the "x-out" option in the window (if you want to delete it) is very tiny. You can find all the flakes here.

Again, I was able to play around with modifying Pageflakes (adding and deleting widgets) without registering for the service. The obvious sorts of content that you would find on a portal page (like your ISP's page, or iGoogle, or Yahoo!) are available, but if you dig deeper into the choices, you can find pagecasts on dog shows, condo issues, "African Diaspora fashion" and even the Legaspi family's photo album. These pagecasts look to be a feature that can be created by registered Pageflakes users. In this sense, Pageflakes is like other web organizations like Facebook that have opened up their platform to outside developers.

This is an interesting service, and I can see that it might be very handy for a library to create a low- or no-cost portal that could be highly customized to its needs.