42 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Inspiration, Design, Color, Fonts and More

[Re]Encoded dot Com

Web Design and Development Tips, Tutorials and [Re]lated [Re]sources

Apr 1st, 2008 by admin

Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned veteran these tools, tutorials, lists and other resources are great sites for any web designer. Organized into helpful categories (design inspiration, CSS resources, web design guides, color tools, free fonts and more) this collection not only has useful resources but also categorized links to other lists with 100s more. If you’re not a designer but still need to create sites you still might be best off spending a few bucks on a web page creation tool with a simple GUI than hiring a designer but can still use the first section below and these great wallpapers to get design inspiration!

General Web Design Inspiration and Useful Design Examples

CSS Beauty is not only an active database for well-designed CSS sites but it is also a way to connect designers with potential clients and a source for web design and general aesthetic inspiration.

Web Design Inspiration is a collection of screenshots showing excellent web designs. It is well worth browsing simply for graphic and web design inspiration.

Web Creme is a very simple site and easy to follow on RSS: screenshots are posted, often more than once per day, of truly impressive web designs.

Unmatched Style is a source for businesses and designers who seek inspiration from particularly attractive, interesting and progressive web designs.

Design Firms is one of many sites on which you can find designers directly but your best bet might be a simple Google search or simply contacting the author of a design found through one of the above-listed design inspiration sites.

25 Beautiful Minimalist Web Designs shows the awesome power of simplicity when it comes to web design - more isn’t necessarily better.

24 Great Niche Galleries has screenshots with descriptions and links to various galleries that you might want to see for more web design inspiration.

10 Great Web [Re]Designs of 2007 features mostly popular and mainstream sites you may already be familiar with but also provides some useful analysis.

Best of CSS 2007 is another great screenshot-packed eye-candy collection of cool web designs from last year - worth bookmarking for future inspiration.

CSS Web Design Examples, Tutorials and Other Resources

CSS Zen Garden allows you to see the full visual potential of CSS designs. You can pick a style sheet and load it onto the page to view the remarkable differences. The goal of the site is to engender new ideas about and discussions around the possibilities inherent in CSS-based design. While underlying code remains the same throughout the visual differences are readily apparent when you switch between views.

CSS2 Specifications is the place to start with CSS (or go back to when you are stuck). Yes, it isn’t trivial, but it is helpful and (despite the ironic lack of good design on the site itself) is something that everyone should have bookmarked if they are still learning CSS.

The CSS Panic Guide is a resource list which, as you might have guessed, is designed for those moments of utter despair and deparation where you are simply stuck. It is fairly well organized and contains links you’ll likely know as well as ones you won’t. This web design link list features everything from validation and text size to accessibility and media types.

The CSS Shark answers some frequently asked questions, explains some of the basics of CSS offers you a tutorial about Positioning with CSS (CSS-P, web design without tables). There is also a page with interesting links to other on- and off-site resources.

CSS Vault is a highly respected (PageRank resource for sharing beautiful CSS designs and layouts that involves (moderated) community communication regarding designs. If you want to get into active CSS discussions this is one place to do that. The content is frequently updated and the user feedback is generally positive. Overall, this is a great place to browse for interesting and well-done CSS web designs and even find designers.

101 more CSS Tips, Tutorials and Examples is what it sounds like: another great resource list if the aforementioned ones don’t fully handle your needs. Unfortunately, the resources aren’t fully described though some descriptive terms are used as part of the link text.

Web Design Guides and Readings on Contemporary Design and Style

Web Design from Scratch is a great resource for a web designer or aspiring designer of websites either just getting started or already experienced. It is designed to show explicit criteria for success and failure as well as step-by-step guides and instructions for improving your designs. Whether you are completely new to web design, working on new design project or simply revisiting and revising an old web design this is well worth checking out and bookmarking for future reference.

Current Style in Web Design Guide takes you through a series of successful and contemporary designs and then parses the various elements that go contribute to the success of these creative designs. From the particular designs, the author of this useful web design guide extracts general principles which can be applied to other designs. For those of us who have difficulty making the jump from principles and examples to actual design practices this is a must-read guide.

Web 2.0 How-To Design Style Guide: This design guide discusses the generally known but rarely articulated styles associated with designing for what is known as “Web 2.0″ by some and cursed as a passing fad by others. Whether or not you buy into the concept of Web 2.0 or consider it overused and outdated this will take you through the parts and pieces of such designs in a way worth at least browsing through if not bookmarking. On a related note, here are 99 Resources for Good Web 2.0 Design.

Color Tools, Ideas, History and Palette Creation Resources

COLOURlovers is probably the web’s top resource for all things color from color inspiration to palette examples, color history and inspiring uses of color. The tricks learned here can be applied to web design as well as other kinds of design work and are designed for both the color-savvy as well as the virtually color-blind designer.

ColorBlender lets you select a preferred color and then creates a palette based on that input. Blends can be saved for future use and tweaked as needed.

4096 Color Wheel is a pretty straightforward and user-friendly tool for creating color palettes and shifting color schemes.

ColorSchemer Studio suggests palette ideas based on initial and changeable inputs and is both fun to play with as well as useful for professionals.

Photo Color Matcher lets you create a color palette from an existing image of your choice. This can be helpful to people who don’t have a natural eye for color and for clients who may wish to have a designer create a color scheme from a photograph or other image.

Web 2.0 Color Palette is organized to help you develop color schemes based on certain criteria that will fit into a so-called Web 2.0-type scheme.

The Meaning of Colors explains the origins of associations we have with colors including cross-cultural analysis of the meanings of colors across ethnic and geographic groups.

Elegant, Obscure, Abstract and Other Free Fonts

Creamundo is a great place to start searching for free fonts organized in useful ways and easy to view custom samples of prior to downloading. These fonts range from simple and refined to complex and unusual with everything in between.

ShowFont has a likewise extensive collection of free fonts of different kinds

Urban Fonts aren’t all necessarily urban in any traditional sense but many of them are quite interesting and out-of-the-ordinary. Some are based on classic fonts while others are quite creative and original, much like those found at Abstract Fonts or at Better Fonts.

SimplyTheBest has a helpful series of categories that are easy to navigate and understand which, despite their somewhat limited selection, makes them worth seeing.

Mike’s Sketch Pad includes a lot of great fonts but some of them can only be used for non-commercial purposes so be sure to check out the creator details.

Modern Life is an elegantly-designed site run by a skilled designer who recognizes the power of good fonts and shows you some recently successful examples.

TypeTester won’t work for every font but is extremely useful for those it has and to give you a general idea of what different fonts will look like in different situations.

1001 Free Fonts is yet another source for free fonts if the above resources weren’t enough.

Other Great Web Design and General Design Resources

The Landing Page Composer is one great way to go if you aren’t much of a designer and don’t intend to be. It is a program that allows users to create a range of landing page designs from basic templates using a remarkably simply graphic user interface.

Open Source Web Design is a trading post of sorts for web designers to share free web design templates with one another for the common good of web design and designers.

Blue Vertigo is a hodge-podge collection of free resources for web designers including stock photography sites and free fronts, brushes and clip art.

Browser Shots is a great pre-final test site for web designers. The site allows you to see what your design will look like in various browsers.

Top 50 Logo Design Tutorials is a useful collection of logo design guides, accompanied by screenshot images, that range in content from simply elegant to striking and complex.

51 Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials Many designers fail to see the importance of text and text effects as a critical component of quality web designs. These text effects are an essential part of any web designer’s toolbox.

9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design is another good place to start and get your bearings if you’re a relatively new designer or want a refresher course.

Tags: Color, CSS, Design, Fonts, Graphics, Links, Web Design

Posted in Aesthetics, CSS, Graphics, Tools, Tutorials, Web Design

47 Responses to “42 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Inspiration, Design, Color, Fonts and More”

1. on 01 Apr 2008 at 8:20 pm1Digital Revolutions

   Extensive, and quite inclusive. Good list.

2. on 02 Apr 2008 at 9:00 am2Elijah

   Great list, I especially liked the zen garden.

3. on 02 Apr 2008 at 9:12 am3Kung Foodie

   The irony is that most designers probably already have these sites bookmarked.

4. on 02 Apr 2008 at 9:37 am4Joost De

   Great list! There are a few that I haven’t used yet, like Creamundo and Landing Page Composer, so I’ll give those a try.

5. on 02 Apr 2008 at 9:47 am542 Essential Web Design Resources [w/Links to 100s More] « Scorchman’s Weblog

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6. on 02 Apr 2008 at 10:07 am6RXaver Bookmarks for March 9th through April 2nd | Disruptive Technocrat

   […] [Re]Encoded dot Com » Blog Archive » 42 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Insp… - […]

7. on 02 Apr 2008 at 10:08 am7JaxSean

   Very nice - bookmarked!

8. on 02 Apr 2008 at 10:20 am8Geoserv

   A few I wasn’t aware of as well, thanks for posting.

9. on 02 Apr 2008 at 11:06 am9Bob Lawrence

   Great list. I have a bunch of these tools bookmarked now. Tossed those out and bookmarked your post. Nice work.

   Bob L.

10. on 02 Apr 2008 at 11:06 am10Bob Lawrence

    Great list. I have a bunch of these tools bookmarked now. Tossed those out and bookmarked your post. Nice work.

    Bob L.

11. on 02 Apr 2008 at 11:19 am11Links for April 2nd | noahcarter.com

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12. on 02 Apr 2008 at 12:26 pm1242 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Inspiration, Design, Color, Fonts and More

    […] See the List […]

13. on 02 Apr 2008 at 12:51 pm13Dude

    WoW another list of web design resources - Just what the world needed!

14. on 02 Apr 2008 at 1:04 pm14Davzie

    I can’t believe that another one of these golden lists somehow managed to weed its way to the front page. *sigh*

15. on 02 Apr 2008 at 1:16 pm15» Blog Archive » 42 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Inspiration, Design, Color, Fonts and More

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16. on 02 Apr 2008 at 2:18 pm16Eternal Sunshine » Blog Archive » Another Resource Link I’ll Never Have Time To Look At

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19. on 02 Apr 2008 at 3:39 pm19Chris Carlson » links for 2008-04-02

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20. on 02 Apr 2008 at 5:23 pm20stacy

    is it supposed to be a joke that the most horridly designed ad FOR a web designer is at the bottom of this list? (Aaron Stokes? Flashing ad? Anyone?)

21. on 02 Apr 2008 at 5:28 pm21Cool Links #2 (With some not-so-cool links) « TEACH J: For Teachers of Journalism And Media

    […] Links #2 (With some not-so-cool links) April 2, 2008 — teachj ReEncoded.com - 42 resources for designers.  I haven’t even gone through all the links yet, but many of […]

22. on 02 Apr 2008 at 5:36 pm22links for 2008-04-03 | Disruptive Technocrat

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23. on 02 Apr 2008 at 6:38 pm23links for 2008-04-03 at DeStructUred Blog

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24. on 02 Apr 2008 at 7:46 pm24tonetheman

    also crossbrowsertesting.com is a good site. easy way to test different os/browser combos.

25. on 02 Apr 2008 at 10:31 pm25Skylog » Blog Archive » links for 2008-04-03

    […] 42 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Inspiration, Design, Color, Fonts and More (tags: layout) […]

26. on 02 Apr 2008 at 11:50 pm26Dima Bilan

    Thank you for this great resource.
    I hope to apply this great examples of design on my own website. This comprehensive list is a great help to me !

27. on 03 Apr 2008 at 12:32 am27John

    nice work, good to see Zen Garden on the list.

28. on 03 Apr 2008 at 2:17 am2842 Essential Web Design Resources | webbiee

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29. on 03 Apr 2008 at 2:36 am29links for 2008-04-03 « Bob’s Weblog

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30. on 03 Apr 2008 at 4:57 am30sonal

    Than You For great resource

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32. on 03 Apr 2008 at 12:18 pm32Resurse pentru webdesigneri şi webmasteri | CNET.ro

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34. on 03 Apr 2008 at 3:35 pm34links for 2008-04-03 « toonz

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36. on 03 Apr 2008 at 6:32 pm36Steven Snell

    Thanks for the link. I’ve received a ton of traffic the last few days from it.

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38. on 04 Apr 2008 at 2:55 am38Martyn

    I’ve also bookmarked this, fantastic thank you.

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41. on 04 Apr 2008 at 7:54 pm41moserw

    Great comprehensive list. This will take some time for me to go through and read up on. Thanks a lot!

    moserw
    http://www.nela.in

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44. on 07 Apr 2008 at 11:49 am44IDX

    Must bookmark is right. Great work.

45. on 09 Apr 2008 at 1:47 am45Top Software Development Company India

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46. on 10 Apr 2008 at 2:54 am46ZieDesign | Blog of a Freelance Designer » Blog Archive » 42 Essential Web Design Resources with Links to 100s More

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47. on 11 Apr 2008 at 4:21 pm47Brad Bodine

    Thanks for the great sites. I have not found many of these mentioned in your post.

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Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

How To Manage Your Website Design Projects

Andy Howard

Creating an efficient project management process, such as Leo’s Guide to Simple Project Management, provides the framework for freelance designers to deliver on time and make a profit. However, the biggest challenge for a designer is efficiently managing client feedback and communication. Profit margins are quickly eroded when clients drip-feed design feedback intermittently or request monster changes towards the completion of a project.

Without a very trusting working relationship these issues are difficult to manage once they occur. The best solution? Avoid them in the first place.

Rewrite the Brief

When clients are involved from the beginning of the design process changes will be minimized later. Client involvement requires more than communicating acceptance of a brief and providing regular status updates. The client needs to provide input into the design. The challenge for a designer is to maintain the position of the design director without becoming a design monkey following instruction, and this challenge is best overcome by restating the brief on your own terms.

As an expert and trusted advisor, a large part of any freelancing gig is helping the client to discover what they really need. Written briefs are typically bounced back and forth between freelancer and client until both parties agree the words identify the best solution for the client. While a written brief is important, a visual brief will allow you to set your design direction early and gain buy-in from the client from the beginning. It also allows you to fail fast: if the client dislikes your direction, sometimes it’s best to walk, and a visual brief provides the perfect fail-fast litmus test.

Brief Your Client Visually

In restating the client’s brief, you’re actually briefing the client on your intended direction and goals. This is a paid exercise and should be presented as your project understanding and direction. Some education may be required in order for the client to see value in this, and one tactic you can use is to articulate the importance of agreeing on direction early rather than delivering a design the client dislikes at the conclusion of the project.

Make your brief as visual as possible to establish your direction from the outset. In the context of website design projects, this can be done using a combination of mood boards, design description documents, sketch-boards, or even a comic strip. Your brief can be a combination of technical and lo-fi. For example, a digital mood board combined with paper sketch-boards is an efficient and effective means of setting a direction and communicating your understanding of the brief.

If the client dislikes your brief, discuss the aspects that require changing and if the changes fit with your direction, you should accommodate them with an amended brief. Alternatively if the client’s mindset is completely different to yours and the changes don’t fit with your vision, it’s time to fail fast. It’s best for everyone. If you persist with the project you’ll find it hard to love executing someone else’s ideas and your design is not likely to be your best. The client won’t receive value for money and you’ll be unhappy. Walk away.

If you’ve hit the sweet spot where both you and the client are happy, it’s time to move the project on based on your brief. The next challenge is collaborating with the client on work in progress so the end result appeases both parties.

Collaborate Visually

Familiar with receiving feedback and changes via countless instant messages, email trails and project tasks? Not only is the feedback difficult to manage, it’s not visual, meaning it’s often ambiguous and can lead to subsequent changes. The solution is simply not to allow it. Instead, find a visual tool that works for you and your client, and mandate its use for all feedback and design communication.

Several desktop applications do a reasonable job of marking up designs with comments and basic design features, and this is certainly a better solution than IM or email. There are still a few issues with this approach; clients will need to learn how to use the application, and the numerous marked up files require version control.

Overcoming both of these issues, the recently launched ConceptShare is a web-based application for online design collaboration. Built for designers to collaborate on designs with multiple stakeholders, ConceptShare allows designers to upload their designs to a client-specific workspace and invite stakeholders to review the designs. The designer and client can then collaboratively markup the designs and comment on specific design elements, facilitating an efficient online feedback loop for ongoing design communication. The interface is intuitive and entirely browser based, providing a simple and efficient platform for managing design feedback.

If you’re not prepared to use yet another web application to manage clients but you’re already using the popular collaboration tool Campfire, see how the 37signals team uses Campfire internally to manage design.

The Best Is Yet to Come

Once you’ve developed enough trust with a client that a conversation is sufficient for managing feedback, you’re in a very happy place. After a number of successful projects with a client, nothing quite beats a chat over Skype video (except for a chat over coffee) as a means of managing design feedback. The spoken word between trusting parties will always be the most efficient and effective means of communication, but it can be difficult to manage without a successful business history.

 

• 9 Insane Portfolio Designs to Make You Drool (36)
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• When The Project Goes Terribly, Terribly Wrong: Freelancing and Public Furor (35)
• The GoMedia Arsenal Calling Card Competition Winners! (17)

Technorati Tags: FreelanceSwitch,ConceptShare,Manage your WebSite Project

And the Crunchies award winners are….

Go To VentureBeat

By Eric Eldon 01.18.08

Here are the winners, in no particular order:

Best technology innovation / achievement:
Earthmine is building a geospatial platform that will provide a database of in-depth 3D data into Web map applications, so that you can drive virtually around major metropolitan areas – it lets you do things like measure sizes of buildings, tag points of interests and get birds eye views of favorite places.

Best bootstrapped start-up
Techmeme constantly aggregates top tech-news stories from across the web, and displays them in a running stream on its site, with the most popular story of the moment at the top of the page. Beneath each story on the site, you can see the most interesting related commentary from other sources. Since it launched, Techmeme has gotten tech reporters and bloggers around the world addicted. Some, like myself, check it more than once, every waking hour.

Best new gadget / device
Apple’s iPhone is most beautifully designed phone ever, with a large screen that lets you easily browse mobile web pages. It is credited with alerting Americans to the fact that mobile internet usage is a fun and even useful experience to have. Some call it the Jesus Phone. Enough said.

Best business model
Zazzle gives users a way to personalize products like apparel, posters, U.S. Postage and greeting cards online, and then sell them. It’s model genius is using online affiliate stores.

Best design
SmugMug is an online photo sharing site, with the features you’d expect with a modern photo site, including tagging and integration with maps and other bells and whistles. But setting it apart from literally hundreds of other photo sites is its elegant design.

Best enterprise start-up
Zoho is a prolific creator of business-focused software applications, including word processing, spreadsheets, and much, much more.

Best consumer start-up
Meebo lets you IM with people on AOL, GTalk, MSN and Yahoo, all from its own site. It introduced a new feature last May that lets you embed a Meebo group chat on sites across the web. Traffic has ballooned as a result. While the company’s home site has seven million monthly users, Meebo room widgets have nearly 20 million.

Best mobile start-up
Twitter has caught fire in early-adopter circles around the world as the way to constantly see what your friends are up to. You’re given 140 text characters to answer the question “what are you doing” Note: I’ve been scratching my head about the point of Twitter for many months. The past few weeks, though, I started following what others were saying on it, posting my own messages — and all of a sudden, I’m addicted. You can follow my often-not-business-focused Twitter account here.

Best international start-up
Netvibes is a personalized web pages have proven to be popular with many, many people, and Netvibes has led the way. It lets you add RSS feeds from news sites, the latest emails from your emails accounts, updates from your calendar and much more.

Best user-generated content
Digg is the social news site everyone has heard of. The site lets anyone contribute links to articles and other information around the web, then every so-called Digger gets to vote on it. As many web publishers have discovered, if your story gets popular on Digg, the ensuing traffic (of mostly, it seems, geeky teenage guys) might take down your site.

Best video site
Hulu is an online video site that features professionally produced videos from major broadcasters. Before it launched this fall, most of us in Silicon Valley were skeptical that it could get off the ground in the face of competition from YouTube and the many other online video sites out there. Its clean interface — and more importantly, great videos — have won a great many fans.

Best clean tech start-up
Tesla Motors has been developing some of the most exciting electric cars around. Especially the Roadster, that can go from 0 mph to 60 mph in about 5 seconds

Best use of viral marketing
StumbleUpon directs you to sites that you’re likely interested in based on what other people have chosen who have shown similar tastes to you in the past.

Best time sink site
Kongregate. Online gaming is big, gaining millions of fans of all ages and both genders — and Kongregate is part of that bigness. The site features games from independent developers, and lets anybody play games for free, and vote on them.

Most likely to make the world a better place
DonorsChoose.org was pioneered by teachers at a Bronx public high school frustrated by the lack of materials. They connected teachers online with individuals want to donate.

Most likely to succeed
WordPress wasn’t the first blogging platform, but it charged onto the scene by letting anybody download and install an open-source version of its code. It has since added premium features, like a great spam filter, and is growing fast. See below for more.

Best start-up founder
Mark Zuckerberg. The 23 year old entrepreneur started a social network for college campuses back when he was a sophomore at Harvard — and you know the rest of the story. Zuckerberg and Co. have redefined what social networking is. Many other social networks started and got big before Facebook. But this company understands the secret sauce of human behavior. It has managed to create a site where people use their real names and pictures to engage in social interaction. See below for more.

Best start-up CEO
Toni Schneider is a successful entrepreneur as well as investor at True Ventures, Schneider has taken WordPress from a fast-growing open-source project to a large, profitable and still-growing business — that’s still focused on making blogging something anybody can do for free.

Best new start-up of 2007
iMedix hopes to revolutionize the U.S. medical system by tapping the bottom-up information-sharing capabilities of the iMedix draws users into a community where they can share information about their medical conditions. It offers both health-related search and patient-community building.

Best overall
Facebook — see “Best start-up Founder.” The social network is rabidly popular with its core audience of college students in the US, and has gone on to win the hearts of high school students, office workers and other people of all ages, around the world.

Here’s an abbreviated list of, dare I say it, revolutionary new features the company has introduced: Closed networks of only people who are physically near you, news feeds, and a developer platform so third parties can run their applications within and make money from them. Other social networks have since basically copied the news feed and application concept.

 

Technorati Tags: The Crunchies,VentureBeat,Winners List 2008

PageOnce to Put All Your Online Accounts in One Place

Mark Hendrickson   47 comments »

Go to PageOnce

Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.

The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).

Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.

PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.

PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.

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CrunchBase Information

PageOnce

Website:
www.pageonce.com

Location:
Palo Alto, California, United States

Founded:
May 1, 2007

Funding:
$1.5M

PageOnce, a stealthy start-up, is developing an internet “assistant” that will both help consumers manage their online lives, and marketers connect with those same consumers.

The company plans to unify information from the diverse internet… Learn More

Netvibes

Website:
www.netvibes.com/

Location:
Paris, France

Founded:
September 1, 2005

Funding:
$16M

Netvibes is one of the pioneers of the personalized home page. Netvibes lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs on one fully-customizable page. , Netvibes recently introduced a pre-beta version of… Learn More

Pageflakes

Website:
www.pageflakes.com/

Location:
San Francisco, California, United States

Founded:
January 1, 2006

Pageflakes is a personalized Ajax home page service with key features being customized widgets, an RSS reader and group sharing capabilities. Pageflakes allows you to put all your web favorites, including news, email and search engines, onto one… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch,Pageflakes,Netvibes,pageonce

The Search For The Elusive Captive Audience

Means No More Contemplation?

from the we-need-meditation-rooms dept

For a while now, we’ve been pointing out that the captive audience is dead, and anyone who bases their business model on intrusive or annoying advertising to a captive audience is likely to be in trouble. However, Jeremy Wagstaff is pointing out one other unintended consequence of all of this: which is that companies are increasingly searching for that elusive captive audience. He notes that he used to be able to spend time on the bus just looking out the window and contemplating, but now there are strategically placed video screens that make contemplation difficult. These sorts of things are showing up everywhere. I find it increasingly rare to step into an elevator these days that doesn’t have a video screen with some sort of advertising on it. Hell, even urinals aren’t safe any more. Basically, companies are looking anywhere possible where they might be able to find a captive audience and are shoving some kind of advertising in the way, and that means fewer spaces where people can just be alone with their thoughts. Of course, in the end, this will simply contribute to ad blindness, making all of these efforts a waste of money.

17 Comments | Leave a Comment..

The Personalized Homepage War: Who Matters

 

 

Michael Arrington

52 comments »

It’s time for an update on the personalized homepage wars - Netvibes and Pageflakes tend to get most of the press attention, and they are certainly pushing the envelope and trying to find new ways to make their services useful to users. But those two services have less than 4% of the market for personalized homepages between them (I have emailed both companies to see if their internal stats match what we have below).

About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space - MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined - 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are.

One thing to note on the data - it does not take into account duplications (where a user visits multiple of these sites, they are counted as users of all of the sites), so the numbers are really only to show relative size).

Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old.

A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a lot of users on their site. It’s going to be a long haul.

minimize

CrunchBase Information

Netvibes

Website:
www.netvibes.com/

Location:
Paris, France

Founded:
September 1, 2005

Funding:
$16M

Netvibes is one of the pioneers of the personalized home page. Netvibes lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs on one fully-customizable page. , Netvibes recently introduced a pre-beta version of… Learn More

Pageflakes

Website:
www.pageflakes.com/

Location:
San Francisco, California, United States

Founded:
January 1, 2006

Pageflakes is a personalized Ajax home page service with key features being customized widgets, an RSS reader and group sharing capabilities. Pageflakes allows you to put all your web favorites, including news, email and search engines, onto one… Learn More

iGoogle

Company:
Google

Website:
www.google.com/ig

iGoogle is a personalized home page that allows users to add tabs, themes and drag-n-drop widgets to their home page. The site has a whole bank of third-party widgets to choose from including widgets for news, tools, sports and lifestyle. Users can… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch,Arrington,Netvibes,Pageflakes,iGoogle,MyYahoo,MyMsn,MyAOL/MyNetscape

35 Ways to Stream Your Life

Written by Josh Catone / February 29, 2008 10:49 AM / 30 Comments

Go to ReadWriteWeb

It’s a pretty good bet that if you’re not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you’re probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we’ll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. The purpose of this post, rather than to review, is to just list the various options out there.

Lifestreaming apps generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend’s lifestreams (or both). For the sake of clarity, we’ve focused mainly on the former for this list.

• Tumblr - Tumblr is a microblogging application that also allows the inclusion of activity streams from other services.
• Onaswarm - Onaswarm, which is in private beta, is a dedicated lifestreaming app that supports a wide variety of other services.
• Jaiku - The chief function of Jaiku, as a presence app similar to Twitter, is enhanced by letting users aggregate activity from outside services.
• Lifestrea.ms - Lifestrea.ms — in closed beta — is a dedicated activity stream aggregator that quotes our review in the company line by calling itself a “standards based nerve center.”
• Soup.io - Similar to Tumblr, Soup.io is a microblogging application. It also supports outside status updates for 11 services and any RSS feed.
• FriendFeed - Due to being founded by a bunch of ex-Googlers, FriendFeed might hold the crown for most talked about lifestreaming app. It supports nearly 30 web sites.
• MyBlogLog - MyBlogLog, which specializes in creating ad-hoc social networks around blogs, just got into lifestreaming with an update last night.
• Profilactic - Profilactic supports 135 sites. Yes, 135 sites. As well as the ability to add your own. Have fun.
• iStalkr - iStalkr is a hub for your social media activity and that of your friends and family, with a unique approach to lifestreaming that puts your life on a timeline.
• Correlate.us - Correlate.us creates a river of activity for a handful of supported sites, and graphs which sites you use the most, all with the design sensibilities of del.icio.us.
• ProfileFly - Focused on social networks, ProfileFly creates a replacement profile that mashes up status updates from your existing social profiles.
• Second Brain - Second Brain takes takes a slightly less automatic approach to life streaming by asking that you categorize and group your activity into collections. See our review.
• Explode.us - Explode.us is a social media search engine that also offers “a profile to consolidate your various online presences.”
• liveZuu - A lifestreaming application that supports 28 networks and offer a Facebook app.
• OneSwirl - A newer dedicated lifestream aggregator that celebrated its first public release today.
• Socialthing! - Currently in closed beta, Socialthing! is a promising lifestreaming service that offers a nifty-looking iPhone optimized version. They’re planning to release the service at SXSW.
• iminta - iminta keeps you up-to-date on what your friends are “in to” and lets you share your own activity stream.
• Plaxo Pulse - Most famous for helping to get Robert Scoble temporarily banned from Facebook, Plaxo’s Pulse product lets you aggregate activity from a wide variety of third party services.
• Identoo - A fairly standard social streaming site.
• Escaloop - Escaloop is a free-form lifestreaming app that lets you combine up to 20 RSS feeds into a single stream (yeah, there are other RSS mixers out there, but Escaloop is notable on this list for specifically targeting lifestreaming).
• Hictu - Hictu is a video microblogging app that supports importing activity streams from outside services.
• Life2Front - Life2Front’s LiFE-Line activity stream feature is a functional activity stream aggregator, if not the most attractive.
• 30Boxes - The online calendar app also has lifestreaming capabilities.
• Readr - Readr mashes 21 different sites into a single profile feed.
• Suprglu - Suprglu pulls content from the web services you use and then republishes them in blog format.
• Where is me? - A lifestreaming app that pulls from 11 services or RSS feeds.
• Slifeshare - Lifestreaming via a Mac OS X application (Windows promised soon).
• MovableType ActionStreams - For do-it-yourselfers, MovableType offers a lifestreaming plugin for their blog platform.
• SimpleLife - More for the DIY set, SimpleLife is a lifestreaming plugin for WordPress.
• WP Lifestream - Another lifestreaming plugin for WordPress.
• RSS Stream - You guessed it, a third lifestream plugin for WordPress.
• oneConnect - Yahoo!’s oneConnect mobile service includes activity stream aggregation features.
• Facebook (?) - Rumor has it that Facebook will be opening up the news feed to outside service updates.
• Socialstream - Nothing has come out of it yet, but this Google funded academic project at Carnegie Mellon University into lifestreaming has garnered a ton of press attention.
• Jeremy Keith’s Lifestreaming Script - Jeremy Keith’s lifestreaming script was one of the first and inspired some of the services on this list.

Technorati Tags: Lifestreaming,ReadWriteWeb,35 ways to Stream your life

Sometimes Good Guys Do Finish First

    from the google-did-it dept

My friend Reihan Salam has an interesting piece in Slate that nicely pulls together much of the discussion at Princeton’s Computing in the Cloud workshop last month. He argues that web startups that have cultivated a squeaky-clean image start to have difficulties when they start trying to monetize all the traffic they’ve generated.

• The most obvious example is Facebook’s Beacon fiasco. Reihan suggests that the “immaculate capitalism” of early-stage startups gives way to ordinary profit-seeking once companies face pressures to turn a profit. There’s clearly something to this, but I think Reihan’s time horizon might be a little bit too short.
• Keep in mind that even the mighty Google faced questions about its profitability as it stubbornly resisted the pay-for-placement schemes that many other search engines adopted. Google’s refusal to compromise the quality of its search results for short-term profits helped it build market share, and it ultimately found non-disruptive ways to monetize all of those eyeballs.

Facebook and Wesabe are much younger companies, and so it’s not too surprising that they haven’t found the right model for monetizing their users. Ultimately, their reputation with users is their most valuable asset, and so it’s smart business to safeguard that reputation, even at the cost of foregoing some short-term business opportunities.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

6 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Reader Comments

by Anonymous Coward on Feb 29th, 2008 @ 11:43am - Facebook sold out in a way that no other company would dream of… they are charing users money to send pictures of items to each other, and then they charge advertisers money to advertise. Finally to add the ultimate insult, they charge the advertisers based on information inappropriately gathered from the user base without compensating the users back for their info. Would you give out your baby sister’s movie preferences to advertisers and give her nothing in return as they generate you a profit, facebook employees? Because that’s what you’re doing with my baby sister’s movie preferences. (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

gotta agree with post #1 by Matt on Feb 29th, 2008 @ 11:48am Sorry, but Beacon is nuts. If it weren’t for that a ton of my friends are on Facebook I’d have never joined the site. Any site that gets info from other sites without asking me first is somewheres near lawsuit land in my opinion. It’s still only a matter of time. The unfairness here is the difficulty in pinning it down. Whose fault is it? Yelp for giving Facebook the information, or Facebook for getting it from Yelp for example?

Since those agreements are confidential the only way to get some info is to go forward with a lawsuit and subpoena. This is absolutely stupid. No amount of PR can rationalize off that you’re just trying to monetize your customers in any way possible. (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

So just don’t use it then by lolsuit on Feb 29th, 2008 @ 12:04pm So… just don’t use facebook then. Works for me. (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

by Wyatt on Feb 29th, 2008 @ 2:19pm No kidding, why use it if it makes you upset. They are a for profit company so expect them to attempt to make a profit. Until someone figures out some kewl new way of making money on the web - we are stuck with what we have now. Besides, its free to use the thing so who cares? (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Are they forced to join facebook.com? by G on Feb 29th, 2008 @ 3:03pm - I have a solution… don’t sign up for facebook. Your comment is just ignorant. Facebook isn’t forcing anyone to sign up and even if you do you can delete your account so stop crying about. (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Re: Are they forced to join facebook.com? by Le Blue Dude on Feb 29th, 2008 @ 9:05pm -Really hard to delete facebook account. Someone set up one for me once without my permission. I just ignore it. (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Technorati Tags: TechDirt,Facebook Baccon,good guys finish first

WikiLeaks shutdown over a single Document

Why Did A California Court Hide All Of WikiLeaks Over A Single Document?

  from the seems-excessive dept

Over a year ago, we wrote about the Wikileaks project, designed to allow government and company officials to anonymously leak documents as a way of whistleblowing questionable activities. Apparently, it’s been quite successful at times. However, in doing so, it’s also building up a list of enemies, including one who has apparently convinced a California court to make the entire site disappear in the US.

The Swiss banking group, Julius Baer, was upset by documents found on the site that they believe were posted by a former VP at the bank, alleging that the bank was involved in money laundering operations. Julius Baer’s lawyers claim that having these documents public could influence ongoing litigation in Switzerland (one assumes having to do with money laundering). While it’s understandable that the bank might not want those documents online, or that those documents might impact current litigation, that doesn’t explain why the California court ordered the entire site offline, demanded that its registrar block the transfer of the domain, force the registrar to point all visitors to a blank page and also having the registrar hand over all information on IP addresses of people who accessed the wikileaks site.

All of that seems rather excessive, and of questionable legality. After all, doesn’t Section 230 of the CDA provide safe harbor for the service provider? I could see an order demanding the specific documents be taken down, but the rest of the order seems to go well beyond what’s both reasonable and standard in cases of this nature.

The folks behind Wikileaks are equally perplexed, noting that they were only given a few hours warning before the hearing, meaning they were unable to attend or send representation. All in all this seems rather excessive, especially compared to existing similar cases on record. Even odder about all of this is that since the court went after the registrar, not whoever is actually hosting the site, you can apparently still reach the actual site if you know the IP address.

Technorati Tags: WikiLeaks,TechDirt

35 Comments | Leave a Comment..