Ketcheson.net

I’ve always loved the browser start page. It is the front door, the on-ramp, the place where it all starts.

Control of this space has moved around a lot over the years - the ISPs once tried to own it, today many companies still use it to hammer home corporate messaging to their employees, and it continues to be the scene of battles for control between the big search engine and portal plays.

Back around the time of Crash 1.0, a company called Octopus.com gave us a glimpse of where the start page was going. These guys were years ahead of the curve with their “My Octopus” tool, which let users create their own, highly personalized, start page, grabbing together content from whatever sites you wanted to bring together. They even gave you the option of scraping in personal banking data from multiple sites. OK, so it was of questionable security and copyright compliance. But, it was a sweet little tool.

Anyway, like so many other dot-com flames, Octopus burned too brightly and the only trail that it has left behind on the Web are a few cryptic pages buried deep in the Internet Archive.

Octopus.com had it right, though.

They’d tapped into one of the Big Truths on the web. People want control over their data, they want the ability to put it all together in one place, mash it up how they like, and figure out their own way to present it to themselves. What do you think the iPod is?

Today, the big players are starting to get it. There is an arms-race of personalization going on between Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to create RSS-enabled, Ajaxified, start pages with all kinds of funky widgets, nifty themes, and OPML import/export functions.

So, who am I rooting for? What is my start page?

Well, I can’t root for Octopus.com anymore. So, after making the rounds and being decidedly underwhelmed by the big guys, I’ve landed on Netvibes.

The Paris-based startup’s tools give me complete control over all my data and its presentation. I’ve got six tabs running, with close to 100 RSS feeds all wrapped up in a pretty package that I can spit out into an OPML file any time I want.

They are not the only ones, of course: Pageflakes and Webwag are in the same place, and offer similar functionality. From my point of view, though, I’ve got no complaints. I’ve locked my start page on Netvibes, and I couldn’t be happier.
One thing that the Octopus.com observations have taught me - Timing matters. They had a great idea. My Octopus offered more functionality in 2000 then we are seeing six years later. But, there was no RSS or Ajax back then to make life easy, their site was plagued by poor load times and frequent crashes as boxes would time-out trying to scrape content from reluctant third-parties. And, there was the small problem of the crashing down of the startup world around them.

As Mark Knopfler once said, “it was just that the time was wrong.”

Let’s hope this round of innovation survives (Netvibes’ recent closure of a $15 mm round of financing should keep them going for awhile), and the startups in this space are able to keep pushing the browser in new directions, and giving us greedy users exactly what we want.