Googortal May 23, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet , trackbackStephen Powell welcomes Google Personalised and supplies an interesting wishlist.
It looks like a Portal to me.
I don’t want to be locked in to anybody’s portal, not even Google’s. If I really needed to have ‘everything on one page’ then I’d build one myself, and if I didn’t know how to do that I could use a commercial blog or wiki which allowed me to add my own links and incorporate rendered RSS streams. All of this stuff is available now, or very soon, but the thing is, I just don’t get this drive to try and ‘contain’ the whole internet experience within the confines of one particular starting point. As far as I can tell it stems from an advertisment based business model which failed because people preferred to define their own homepages rather than have them imposed.
I’ve shifted quite a lot of my stuff onto web based services in the past year or so, so that I can synchronise between home and various workplaces easily, but I do often miss some of the functionality and efficiency of installed client programs.
I may switch back from Bloglines to a Client RSS reader, and I could really do with a program as powerful as Forte Agent for analysing my mailing list data. Gmail is great, but not as powerful as having the database accessible on your own disk with your own choice of tools.
Stephen’s list of three types of space presents the real challenge. the first and last are easy, but the middle one - “for me and my friends, I can control who has access” is not so well provided for on the net as yet. You could set up a ‘group’ within within a web service such as smartgroups, yahoogroups, googlegroups2 or maybe use something like jotspot but hen you are at the mercy of whichever provider you pick once again. I’m not sure how you can set up a completely independent but also private community without having to have somebody in charge, but then I suppose ‘me and my friends’ fits in with the benevolent dictator managment model so that’s OK.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
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