The vibe of the thing

For almost 10 years now I've had my own browser start page. Having always worked with, rather than for, large corporates I've never been forced to have a bland company Intranet as my start page. I am, earlier in my career, guilty of architecting and project managing large (perhaps bland) Intranets, however in my defence I always argued strongly for introducing personalisation, even before there were portal technologies to make it easy.

The first versions of my browser start page were just static HTML files, populated with links to sites I used to visit often. I then moved to a content management system that allowed wysywig editing of this. When Google launched their personalised page service last year I started using this. Being able to have the blogs I read feed into portlets was the killer functionality for me. I wanted more though, being an early adopter of Web 2.0 services like del.icio.us and Flickr I thought it'd be great to be able to integrate those. Google hasn't done that yet, but there's a new service called Netvibes which does. It's a fully customisable start page, into which you can feed blogs, Flickr photos, your del.icio.us bookmarks and a whole host of other things. It feels like Portals have actually come of age, when all they are is a single aggregator page for your own purely self selected content...