Personal Web Pages – The Big Three

Personal Web Pages – The Big Three

It’s the age of personalisation and the big three are all at it – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. I have tried them all just to get an idea what they are like and how usable they are.
I started with Google and signed up with their Personal Page through Google Labs. It’s not bad it lets you add links and content you frequent most but requires that you have a Gmail address in order to access it. If anyone wants to try it let me know and i’ll send them a Gmail invite.

Google personal pages is not the most exciting I have seen but as mentioned it is a good place to store links. I keep it just to store my Google links to their services and a few news items.

Yahoo’s My Web is a bit more interesting than Google’s. First of all it gives more flexibility in saving pages and the layout is a lot nicer and user friendly. It’s almost like having your own news sheet and what to read. It’s still in Beta and not quite ready yet. It gives three options to view your pages – yourself – Your Community – Everyone – I think that this is only going to be viewable if you are a member of the Yahoo network – everyone means all on the network.

Windows Live – I tried this a few hours ago and I must say its layout is cleaner than the above two with crisper colours that can be customised to a certain extent. Actually customised is too flexible a word I would say gives a few choices for colouring the bar.

In my opinion Windows Live came a sound first place for usability and enjoyment. There are so many feature-rich plug-ins (gadgets) that are being made for just about every subject under the sun, RSS readers, live webcam, calculators, tv guides, you name it…
It’s easy enough to create the plug-ins or rather gadgets (as they are called) if you have a little programming experience everything is there for you.

I still think there are many modules missing from the custom pages to make them truly customisable and all three providers could use some serious work to realise this. Items like uploading content and images would be helpful and a little more flexibility on customisation.