In the movie Gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridias is quoted as saying, What we do in life echoes in eternity. Now that LiveUniverse has acquired PageFlakes, I’m modifying that expression to be What PageFlakes Does In Life Echoes In A LiveUniverse. This article is about the acquisition.
PageFlakesis a custom RSS aggregation web site that is a direct competitor of Netvibes and Google reader. PageFlakes can aggregate RSS feeds with news, sports, finance, videos, technology, music, games, movies, TV, food, and gossip. The possibilities are endless.
PageFlakes will still be led by CEO, Dan Cohen, but will be rolled into LiveUniverse’s LiveVideo. The acquisition amount was undisclosed.
Pageflakes has roughly 250,000 Flakes and over 130,000 Pagecasts. The company was launched in 2005 in Germany but relocated to San Fran. Balderton Capital provided PageFlakes’ initial investment. The technology was built with ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX along with JavaScript [source: Wikipedia].
Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Pageflakes Acquisition Confirmed by Erick Schonfeld
There is a slightly new player in the market of RSS consolidation, Feedable. The current major players are PageFlakes, NetVibes, and the search engines that allow you to customize homepages.
Currently, my vote for the best one out there is NetVibes because with PageFlakes, once you click on a link, you are immediately taken to an external website. NetVibes provides a pane with a text/image preview and then you can choose to move to the external page also.
Feedable is slightly different from the rest of the RSS consolidators though and could come out to be a fighter. While PageFlakes and NetVibes support tabs, Feedable goes by more of a cascading folder style. This is a definetely a different approach and I could foresee this as being an advantage.
NetVibes load time takes a blow for every RSS feed that you add to your customized page. For example, I subscribe to over 100 RSS feeds and NetVibes loads all of the stories from each feed. In the title of your customized NetVibes page it displays the number of feed articles that is being loaded. Basically, my NetVibes customized page isn’t finished loading until 717 articles are loaded into the system. To my understanding, Feedable doesn’t actually load the feed until you call upon a folder or category. So if you don’t want to read up on a certain category or folder, why should it have to be loaded?
This is an advantage that Feedable should consider exploiting. Below is a screen shot with an arrow pointing at the folder scheme. You’ll also notice that the navigation once inside the folders look slightly similar to a product that we all know (hint: iTunes).
In summary, I really like the idea of Feedable’s navigation, but I think that the site looks a little bit tacky. There is just something about it that makes me not want to switch from NetVibes just yet. Feedable has potential and thats what counts. Maybe I’m just so used to the panes that PageFlakes and NetVibes provide.
There is a slightly new player in the market of RSS 
