Personalized Start Pages

Traditionally, to subscribe to an RSS feed, you first had to install a news or feed reader on your computer (or you could use most browsers' favorites/bookmarks menu functions). Personalized start pages will also manage the RSS feeds for you though, as well as providing a place to put all your downloaded widgets. I like igoogle best because I can see my gmail inside it, and because you can consolidate all your feeds into google reader so you don't have quite so many boxes floating around. But pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes are also quite popular (for some more background, see Mashable's review of Pageflakes).

As you can see, although these start pages are infinitely customizable, they generally come with some RSS feeds pre-loaded, from big publishers like the New York Times or Flickr, as well as with some of the most popular widgets pre-installed, like the Wikipedia or amazon search bars. I was wondering how the developers of these start pages determine which feeds and widgets to put on the default template for all new users - whether it's just based on popularity and dependability, or whether the publishers actually pay for that placement. I wasn't able to find out much (anything), but it did start me thinking about what would be involved for a publisher that wanted to offer its own version of a personalized start page. I don't know how involved an endeavour that is or whether there is or will be Open Source technology to facilitate it, but it struck me as something that could substantially benefit companies that have existing websites and an existence beyond the start page.

For example, the company I work for full-time is a membership organization that provides educational and career services to the financial industry. If we offered a personalized start page to members and non-members, it could not only include a feed about our upcoming events and member benefits, but could pull feeds from online industry publications like Crain's, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and so on. Constant updates for various exchanges could run in our space, and members who were logged in to their accounts could also have special free access to subscription feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg, Capital IQ, and so forth. Special widgets to calculate stock values, exchange rates, etc., could be pre-installed. Convincing industry professionals to set NYSSA as their home page and to use us as the portal through which a whole realm of online tools and information is accessed would be a substantial benefit in terms of general visibility, in terms of ease of publicizing upcoming events and other special offers, and in terms of promoting (paid) membership in our organization to current non-members in the financial community.

On the other hand, the small literary journal where I'm an editor could benefit from the same scheme in quite a different way. If we set up a personalized start page, it could include a feed for our weekly web-exclusive publications of poetry, prose, and interviews; feeds for updates to the blogs and home sites of our contributors and editors; and feeds for updates to comparable journals and small-press publishers. If we made it interesting and effective enough, people who had never heard of or read our journal might come to it simply as a personalized start page, and might then be drawn to become part of our audience or even a print subscriber.

So it struck me that, as feeds and widgets and stuff like that grows increasingly popular, actually creating and managing personalized start pages holds a lot more marketing and revenue potential for companies than simply putting their info out there in a feed. On the other hand, there are doubtless drawbacks -- technological? expenditure related? -- that I haven't considered.