I recently encountered a cool AJAX-homepage tool thing (such as My Yahoo!, etc.), called ProtoPage. Best thing being, you don't need to register to have a go. So, after a few minutes of cutomising (you should register if you’re serious about using this), it’s officially my homepage.
First thing that strikes to mind, when using it, is the amount of customisability. You can change everything from the colours to the title to where things are placed (obviously) to which feeds you see first to the colour each sticky note’s title is. Anyway, you get the point. Have to say, some things could be easier to on the UI side, such as the ability to update sticky notes on the go instead of a separate window, have a big “Ok” button instead of a small “Save Changes” in the corner, make it possible to update by pressing enter, but these are only small things compared to what ProtoPage’s real power equates to.
One thing I would suggest to the whole team of ProtoPage is better feed reading capabilities. So far, it’s far better than what I’ve experienced with My Yahoo! or for that matter the Google Feed Reader, and this is on its speed/updating side, but if ProtoPage can be transformed so that I can actually use it as an aggregator (as opposed to just ocassionally reviewing quick snippets on some of my most read feeds when I don’t have my official aggregator open), I’d totally love this thing. Oh, and if the name was a bit more wide, general, such as maybe just “Proto” (probably a thousand dollar
domain) maybe that would enable it to extend more ending up as, who knows, a complete aggregation platform?
In conclusion, I’d like to congratulate and thank the ProtoPage team for what they’ve done so far, seems quite promising.
