twopointouch

It’s not important for you to know my name -
Nor I to know yours
If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough
For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me -
And what you give is what you get.

It doesn’t matter if we never meet again,
What we have said will always remain.
If we get through for two minutes only,
It will be a start!
(The Jam, Start!)

There’s nothing like statistical rigor when it comes to research. And my little poll here is nothing like statistically rigorous. However, it’s been sitting there for more than two weeks while readers patently ignored it and it’s time to talk about the results. Anyway, it seems that it is at least as valid as a lot of the polls you read in the papers.

It’s good news for the Web 2.0 guys. While they were the least popular of the three options I presented, they still managed to garner six votes. Since the combined forces of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google only managed ten, I’d call that a pretty solid presence.

“Yeah, right, Ian,” I hear you mutter. “Twenty-three votes is nothing, for a start. Plus you’re polling people who read a blog about Web 2.0 and stuff.”

True enough. However, my own expectation was the mainstream sites would completely dominate the newcomers, and that most people would vote for no personalised homepage. I use vanilla Google myself, but most of the time I’m actually going somewhere else, so “about:none” (which gives you a blank start page) would actually make more sense. Because of this bias, I assumed most people were the same. They’re not.

Netvibes apparently has at least four million users and recently attracted $15mn in seed financing. Leading competitor Pageflakes - backed to an undisclosed figure by Benchmark Capital - presumably has similar user numbers. New entrant Webwag will have fewer, having only just launched. It’s a rocky market, though: Fold.com ahem.. folded on June 3rd, becoming the first entrant to Techcrunch’s Web 2.0 deadpool. On the other hand, single page aggregators, like popurls, are also on the rise. These sites are similar in some respects to the Netvibes crowd, since they put together a bunch of related feeds onto a single page.

It’s pure speculation, of course, but the popularity of these pages might be ascribed to a couple of things:

1) It takes me an hour to read through the 107 111 blogs I subscribe to through bloglines. If I miss a day, it might take two hours. I don’t always have that sort of time. What if I could just get the important stuff on a single page? (cf. Ross Mayfield’s desire for a version of Techmeme that is actually MeMeme)

2) If I then need to visit a calendar, to-do list and a webmail site to complete my catch-up, that’s at least another 30 minutes. The personalised home pages can stick that on the same page as my news.

There are good reasons to use these pages. The question remains, though, as to how these sites are going to make any money. Netvibes, Pageflakes and Webwag haven’t even got any adverts. There’s talk of affiliate deals with Kelkoo, Amazon and so forth, but I see no evidence of that on the pages I’ve set up for myself using these services. Plus, there’s intense competition from mainstream players like Google as well as other AJAX homepage startups. Chris Lake raised this issue back in June.

If I were the boss of Google, Yahoo or MS Live - you know, companies that have (a) an existing personalised start page service and (b) loads of advertisers looking for inventory - I’d be looking very carefully at Netvibes et al. Then I’d copy whatever it is that they’re doing to attract so many users and try to shut them down. Wouldn’t you?