I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and ‘pages’ features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done. Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just emailed my way. And actually Dan is uniquely qualified to discuss this, as before becoming CEO of Pageflakes in January this year he was head of MyYahoo. Here is what he said:
“The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today’s users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others.”
What it comes down to is that Yahoo obviously has a huge store of content and Web properties it can utilize in its personalized homepage. Whereas Pageflakes is one of the ‘little guys’ (along with slightly bigger little guy Netvibes), so its strengths and opportunities will be in opening up its platform and encouraging use of content from all over the Web.
The Web 2.0 will have a large impact on development technology choice. Erlang is the most likely language and development environment to benefit from this trend. The new erlang book will help accelerate this trend as will the ripples in the pond caused by Tim O’reilly’s blog. At Process-one we’re well placed to take advantage of this technology having used Erlang to build a massive messaging server.