I have always been fascinated by online start pages. In fact, some of the earliest articles on this blog were about them.

I have been a member of too many of them to count over the last couple of years. Before they called them that, I had some on places like Yahoo! and even old-school AOL (man that brings back some bad memories). There is just something about being able to bring all the information that is important to you together in a single place. Nowadays its almost required if you are an avid blog reader.

I have always been fascinated by the different approaches, technologies, and ui styles so a while back I contacted a couple of the older start pages out there: Netvibes and Pageflakes. Unfortunately, the Netvibes guys are too swamped right now to finish the interview we started, but I am happy to announce that Ole Brandenburg, one of the co-founders of PageFlakes agreed to “sit down” with me and answer some questions.

So without further ado…

Part I - Introduction

To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with, and what is your role at Pageflakes?
My name is Ole Brandenburg, I am one of the co-founders of Pageflakes and I run Business Development.

For some of our newer readers out there, could you give us a brief history and overview of Pageflakes as a company?
Pageflakes Ltd. was founded in Germany in 2006 and is funded by Benchmark Capital. Pageflakes is headquartered in the United States in San Francisco, California, with operations in Bangladesh, Germany and Malaysia.

Pageflakes is revolutionizing how you use the Internet. With Pageflakes, you can easily customize the Internet and make it yours using “flakes” - small, movable versions of all of your Web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos - even interactive tools like a calendar and a to-do list - and just about anything else you do on the Web at school, work and at home. The Pageflakes community of users creates and helps each other discover more new flakes and share more new Pageflakes pages every day.

Pageflakes is an interesting name…any history behind that?
The idea is based on Snowflakes that fall from the sky and cover everything over time. With Pageflakes, Flakes “fall” from the top down on to your page. It’s “snowing” Flakes so to speak.

You guys are one of the “older” online start pages. What was the original idea behind the site, and what niche were you hoping to fill?
The original slogan was “to simplify the digital life”. While we still hope to achieve that goal the appeal is now much broader I think. However, the basic concept is still to create your very own page (without any programming skills) and set it up in a way that is useful for you. Every person is different and thus all the content that is out there on the Internet is of different importance to different people. We hope to help users create their own Internet experience and then also share it with their friends or colleagues (which we hope to achieve through the Pagecast and Sharing options).

One of the key features on your site is “pagecasts”…what are those and how do they benefit the user?
As our loyal Pageflakes users know, we pioneered the concept of enabling a user’s personalized page to be shared with a private group, edited by multiple people, or published to the world. During that time, and as I’ve blogged about before, users have come up with some incredibly useful, imaginative, and useful ways to express themselves with Pageflakes.

Today we’re thrilled that our rapidly growing user community has now generated and shared well over 100,000 pages around the world, all available in the Pageflakes community Pagecast directory. We refer to Pageflakes pages shared in this manner as “Pagecasts” and feel is a bonafide social media trend with big implications.

In essence, “Pagecasting” is the intersection of personalized pages with social media. Unlike existing social media such as blogs and podcasts, virtually anyone can use Pageflakes to easily and quickly mashup a multimedia page with interactive Flakes that will enable them to express themselves and interact with others in a powerful new way - including, of course, blogs, podcasts, videos, photos and more. Over 100,000 Pagecasters – a prolific subset of our much larger and rapidly growing Pageflakes user base – are enriching the lives of millions of Internet users around the world.

Consider this - all of these Pagecasts and users form an incredibly large network of independent web publishers, each with their own users and audience that they can not only reach but interact with. If each Pagecast, for example, has on average just 50 viewers, than 5 million people are viewing these Pagecasts in the aggregate.

There are diverse Pagecasting examples including teachers educating students, families reaching out across the globe, controversial political opinions being voiced, obsessive fans expressing their love for their favorite teams and celebrities, small business owners reaching new customers, professionals exchanging ideas, and even children being adopted from Africa. Below are links to live, user-generated Pagecasts for of all of these examples - check them out.

After clicking on the links below, the best way, however, to further experience Pagecasting is to visit our Pagecast directory, browse around and search, and see what Pagecasters are doing. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to submit your own Pagecast as well.

Teachers educating students:
Onsted High School
East Lothian School District (Scotland)
Also see: http://student.pageflakes.com/

Families reaching out across the globe:
Ralph Posadas Family
Parker Family

Controversial political opinions being voiced:
Anti-Jihad
Afrosphere Politics and Opinion

Obsessive fans expressing their love for their favorite teams and celebrities:
Dallas Cowboys

Small business owners reaching new customers:
1-800-PACK-RAT
Overdogg.com

Professionals exchanging ideas:
Las Vegas Real Estate
About Marketing

Children being adopted from Africa:
Adopting Children from Ethiopia
Transracial Adoptions

What are some of the other really important features of the site?

In addition to the pagecasts the top two features I think are:

1) Ease of use – Built for the everyday users not for the techie
2) High Quality of content – We have over 100,000 pagecasts, over 200,000 flakes and feeds
3) Total customization including themes, layout and languages

Part II – The Market

The online start page market has gotten pretty crowded over the last year or so, including the biggest names in the online industry. What makes Pageflakes different from the rest?
Personalized homepages have been around for at least ten years, since the dawn of the Worldwide Web (remember My Excite?). In my opinion, some of the current “innovations” in the category haven’t changed things much, except for the use of AJAX, other new technologies to make things look, feel and work a little better, and widgets to provide openness to developers and choice to consumers. The bottom line is that today, from a user perspective, personalized homepages are still, to borrow a line from David Byrne and the Talking Heads, “the same as it ever was.” They are still personal consumption experiences that you use to be informed, be entertained, and organize your web experience.

Of course you can use Pageflakes to “infotain” and organize on a personal level, and frankly I think we’re the best at making it easy and fun to do just that. We’re really driven to make the personalized homepage even easier and more fun to use. That’s a huge focus for us, and you will see continuous innovation from us in that direction.

Most interestingly, however, Pageflakes is also where the innovation in personalized homepages is occurring and where it is redefining the category. For example, we invented the community-driven personalized homepage, and the unique community and social elements that are a fundamental part of our DNA have allowed our users to create amazing new ways to use personalized pages with their friends, family, classmates, coworkers, and others. So, in addition to the wide variety of Flakes created by our developer community, everyday users are publishing their own public pages, creating and sharing page templates as a fun way to start your own new page, and sharing private group pages where members of the group can add, change, and contribute to the experience.

I hear about and see these examples every day, around the world, and it never ceases to amaze me what people are doing with Pageflakes. As someone who knows personalized pages very well, I can tell you - we’re onto something here The best part is that this is but one example of how we plan to continue to redefine personalized homepages.

Does your strategy change when going up against other startups like protopage, or eskobo as opposed to taking on the big guys like Microsoft and Google?
No, our strategy does not change depending on what competitor we are going up against. Our vision is to deliver a solution that is for the everyday user – a solution that allows these everyday users to integrate, access, consume and share all of the information and applications that are important to them – in an easy and fun way.

If you met a web or application developer that had ideas for the next frontier, what advice would you give them about starting out?
Understand what your customers want and do all you can do to deliver that product to them. Getting to the right product for the right market is crucial to getting something started. Also, make sure to have an excellent team with complementing skill sets. Don’t be afraid to give up stock to hire excellent people – ultimately it will benefit the company. Never lose focus, even if the “big guys” knock on the door.

Part III – Design & Technology

On creativeUI, one of the early articles talks about the two main layouts for online start pages (either columns or “do it yourself” like protopage). You guys took the more popular “columns” route. Did you guys ever consider the other side, and what lead you to choose your route?
We looked at both but decided to go with columns. I don’t think there’s a huge upside for grid free placement of flakes (or modules) but the downside is speed. We focus on the quality of content and the ease of use.

Was there ever a third or even fourth option for laying out the content that you later decided to move away from? What made you switch directions?
We looked at a lot of different options and we chose our current solution because we thought it offered the best mix of flexibility and stability, while allowing for easy development and sharing.

What has been the biggest challenge when it comes to designing and developing a site like Pageflakes?
To be perfectly honest there are millions of things. One important factor to know is that no matter how hard you try and how flexible you are, you will never be able to please all people. The key should be to stay focused on the long term goal.

I remember when I first started looking into the whole “Ajax” thing and stumbled around and found Microsoft Atlas (now ASP.NET Ajax). I first heard about you guys because Microsoft was touting you guys as some of the earliest adopters of their framework. There were a lot of other frameworks out there, why choose a pre-alpha version as opposed to say dojo or scriptaculous?
Sorry, I am not a tech guy so I can’t really answer that question. My reply is that as long as the users like it they don’t really mind what kind of technology is driving the platform…

Did you guys end up writing a lot of extenders and such to get the framework to do what you wanted it to? Did you get help from Microsoft directly (I would assume they loved seeing you guys plow ahead)?
Yes and yes

If you had to do it all over, do you think Atlas was the right call, or do you think another framework, or perhaps a homegrown solution may have worked better?
Considering the development over the past 2 years I would say it was the right decision.

I know that you guys have your own API and framework for developers to hook into. How important are user developed “flakes”? Do most of them come from you guys or from the community?
User developed flakes are extremely important to us and we have a large developer base building flakes for our platform. As a matter of fact about half the flakes you see on Pageflakes today are developed by community developers.

Part IV – The Future

What is on the short term horizon for you guys? Any major releases coming up?
We have a new release that was just announced. Here’s the Blog post: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Help/Blog.aspx?ShowComment=1&BlogPost=100

The internet world is fast pace (to say the least), but every company has a plan that spans several years. Obviously you can’t give us specifics, but can you give us a look at the direction Pageflakes will take over the next year, two years, and even five years?

Yes, the Internet world moves quickly, but we like to look at the big picture. We see a world that is quickly being defined by user generated content. We believe the masses want a way to organize, manage, and access that content. We want Pageflakes to be that solution. Our future direction is to continue to make it easier for everyday users, not just techies, to access and share the information and applications that are important to them. The key is and will always be ease of use I believe.

That’s it! Thank you so much for your time.