VistaCrew

Are you getting bored on your startup pages once you open your web browser? Well, then you should take a look into personalised startpages. Personalised Startpage is a Web 2.0 service created to allow users to customise what they want and what they need on their startpages once upon starting the web browser. It’s simply an all-in-one website which shows you your mailbox status, news feeds, weather information, favorite blog updates and many more to be mentioned. Most of them were developed by AJAX technology and of course, full of Java Script controlled eye candy effects to entertain you. Check out more after the jump…

Currently, there are numbers of personalised startpage providers available. The following examples were the most popular and well equipped ones. Of course, amongst them were developed by the “Big Three”: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Netvibes

Netvibes is the pioneer of personalised startpage services. I believe Netvibes’ service was by far the most flexible and the widest variety amongst all. It claimed to be 100% customisable and after testing it, it’s true! It allows users to display contents the way they want. You can simply add/delete/move modules, customize your page’s title, adding tabs and edting modules’ contents. Oh yeah, you can also apply different pre-installed themes too. Besides that, Netvibes offers a great number of additional add on modules which covers a variety of services, including mail syndications(Yahoo! Mail/Hotmail/Gmail), instant messengers (MSN), news feeds, blog feeds, web search engines (Google/Yahoo!/Ask/Wikipedia) , video search (Youtube) and etc. There’s also tool widgets which would benefit you, such as Weather Info, ToDo List, eBay Widget and many more.

iGoogle

Apparently, iGoogle was created by Google itself. Function-wise, it was quite a well equipped service offering to the public. As for my opinion, it acts more or less the same as Netvibes. It offers lots of add on widgets which supports most of the external services found in Netvibes as well. Not only that, iGoogle allows users to create their own widgets and share with their friends too! There’s one feature which I like most in iGoogle, it’s Daylight Theme where the theme colors will change according to the time of the day. Quite cool huh?

My Yahoo!

Well, this was the default startpage for my browser. :p Personally think that this was probably the most aesthetic of all the startpage services available. I like it’s default blue theme which creates a good ambience while starting up your web surfing. Besides aesthetically marvelous, it’s layout was flexible too as you can choose between 2 to 4 columns layout. Basic functions were still available, but if compared with Netvibes and iGoogle, My Yahoo! offers quite a limitation of services. For example, My Yahoo! does not support instant messaging as well as providing ToDo List. Well, I think Yahoo! would need to catch up a bit in order to compete with the likes of Google, which was for sure their biggest rival of all.

My MSN

Lastly, this was the one whom developed by the software giant, Microsft. Well, I believe that this was a product created by Microsoft’s web service arm, MSN as a reply to Yahoo! and Google in order to compete in the market. Basic functions were rather similar compared with other startpage providers and performance was quite decent. No much surprise as services were much limited as well. For the brighter side, it allows users to change themes of their choices, add/delete column, add new pages, and etc.