My Personalized Homepage

Google may be the most popular web search and have a great list of services, but that doesn't mean that those services are the best on the web. Gmail offers little more than its competitors, many of whom have already matched or surpassed google's large mail-holding capacity. Google's spam protection certainly does recognize more emails as spam, but oftentimes, it recognizes not-spam as spam. I use gmail because it has a simple interface and because many users have extended its capabilities through firefox extensions and greasemonkey scripts.

However, this post will deal with a better personalized homepage not a better gmail (that will be in the next post). There are two services gaining popularity in the personalized homepage craze. The search leaders (google and yahoo) have made satisfactory solutions and although yahoo's is better with the modules it offers, it still cannot compare to netvibes and pageflakes.

I would highly recommend either one of them. After examining differences between the two, the only major difference I found was that netvibes has a better interface. Pageflakes apparently has better public access, but this feature is not necessary for the average internet user. You should look both of them over and decide which one you like better in terms of interface. I will focus on netvibes.
The first thing you will want to do is creat an account. You will notice this option in the top right corner. Once you have created your account, you may want to play around with the settings also in the top right. My theme is winter plain. At the top left corner, click add content. If you followed the previous posts and created a del.icio.us account, you WILL want to add the del.icio.us module. As for anything else, look at what is available and click Get More Modules... for other content. You can play around with new tabs and click the Edit link for each module to change more settings, but for the most part, netvibes works without modification. Its simple fast and most of all convenient. I have it set up as my browser start page and I've accessed from other computers without any worry. It is the center of my internet activity.