Pageflakes

» see pageflakes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the personal start page was a category i actually used for a couple of years, but i was on igoogle, not pageflakes. by 2007 the chrome tab i opened first in the morning was an igoogle dashboard with a gmail widget, a weather strip, an rss block reading turkish tech press, and a small bookmarks panel. for whatever reason, pageflakes never came up as the alternative to try. the english tech blogs at the time treated netvibes as the european contender and igoogle as the giant google entry, pageflakes was the third name in the second sentence of those posts.

pageflakes launched in late 2005 from a small team that included ole brandenburg. it was an ajax-based personal portal where each widget was called a flake. you arranged flakes on tabs you could rename and share, the use case was a single page that pulled together rss feeds, weather, email previews, and bookmarks. it had a pubcasting feature for sharing a tabbed page with other users, which was uncommon for the category in 2006.

balderton capital led a funding round in may 2006 when the personal-start-page market still looked like a real category. by then netvibes was the european market leader with 1.4 million us monthly uniques against pageflakes 50000. that comscore measurement from march 2008 was the moment the gap stopped being a gap and became a verdict.

liveuniverse, the holding company run by myspace cofounder brad greenspan, bought pageflakes in april 2008. liveuniverse spent the rest of 2008 buying other fading web 2.0 properties at fire-sale prices and not really investing in any of them. four months after the pageflakes deal the ceo of pageflakes left. the service then ran in long maintenance mode for almost four years, with outages getting longer and the community thinning. on the last day of january 2012 pageflakes.com stopped responding.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the first eighteen months of pageflakes had real momentum. it won a few german web awards in 2006, the developer api was praised for being open at a time when netvibes had a closed widget format. dozens of independent developers built flakes for chess, stock tickers, last.fm now-playing strips, even early-twitter timelines. for a moment in 2006 it looked like pageflakes might do to netvibes what netvibes had been doing to my.yahoo.

google killed that momentum in may 2007 by relaunching its personalized homepage as igoogle with the gadgets directory open to everyone. anyone who had been adding flakes to a pageflakes tab now had the same gadgets available on a page tied to a gmail account they already had. the network effect of a default homepage on the world's most-visited site was not something a small german startup could outwork.

~ what got buried with it ~

pageflakes did not leave a clean export at shutdown. user-built pages and shared pubcasts went down with the domain in january 2012. the api specification is still findable on archive.org for developers curious about the early ajax-portal era. the broader category died with igoogle on november 1 2013 and the personal start page as a daily destination has not really come back since.

the cautionary lesson from the pageflakes arc is that for a venture-funded web 2.0 startup the wrong acquisition was worse than no acquisition. liveuniverse paid a small undisclosed sum in april 2008, took the team out of the market, and then did not run the product. honestly, in a counterfactual where pageflakes had stayed independent it would have died anyway when igoogle scaled and chrome shipped speed dial in 2008. the liveuniverse outcome just made the death slower and quieter.

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