Yahoo, Msn, Google Personalised Home Pages for Surfers.

Searching for the news, quirky bits of information, blogging, messaging and emailing friends during the course of the day are just some of the many facets that make the internet dearer to us than life itself.The good news is that a number of internet companies have, over the years, devised nifty ways of converging many of these different features together by placing them all on a single, personalised webpage. One of the first few personalised homepages was Yahoo’s, at my.yahoo.com. It allowed Yahoo! users to create a page where they could log on and read the news of their choice, see their horoscope and preview e-mail (among other things) by simply signing in. Similarly, Microsoft Network's (MSN's) ever-popular my.msn.com also featured customisable, personalised webpages.However, with spaces.msn.com, MSN took this venture a step further, allowing users the same features (more or less) as well as a chance to place their blogs on the same page and share photos or profiles with the rest of the world.

It may have been in order to combat this move by Microsoft that Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! 360 site (which is still under beta testing). What differentiates 360 from my. yahoo. com is that while the latter has a lot of customised information that users request, the former's information is viewable by other Yahoo! Members. Also, Yahoo! 360, like spaces.msn.com, gives the user a chance to place their blog in full view, add picture albums as well as ASS feeds. (Although, at this point in time, only three are allowed.)

Additionally, Yahoo! also seems to be working towards incorporating an online community such as Orkut. Options such as "blast allow users to send messages to friends and start a discussion. The website also allows for sharing of photographs, user reviews, profiles and personal information with other Yahoo! users, making it possible to exchange messages and "publicly" join existing Yahoo! groups and communities. Ultimately, however, Yahoo! 360 is quite simply a way of staying in touch with others using blogs and photographs in an online community setting that may be more similar to Google's Orkut than a simple personalised webpage.Speaking of Google, perhaps following the personalised home page bandwagon, the company produced its own offering at www.google.com/ig (the "ig" supposedly stands for I, Google) in May 2005. Google's personalised service seems to incorporate most of the features offered by rny.msn.com and my.yahoo.com.

Overall, its more interesting features boil down to the fact that there are more nifty "gadgets" available, many of which have been created by other users. Items such as maps, clocks, internet slang translators and even a bra size calculator, as well as more traditional features such as news feeds, weather updates and horoscopes can easily populate your. personalised page. In the end, Google/ig is a functional personalised homepage with some nifty content and gadgets.

MSN took this personalisation a step further with the establishment of Start.com. This website was a precursor to Live.com, which went "live" in November 2005. (Start.com still exists as an incubation area for experiments before they are integrated into Live.corr!) Live.com, offers yet another perspective. on the customised homepage concept. The content on Live.com is, by default, divided into the following sections, made up of either Gadgets or Feeds:

1. Gadgets (includes mail, weather forecast, horoscopes, ticking clocks)
2. Business (includes BBC News, Economist.com, FT.com)
3. Entertainment (includes celebrity gossip pages, as well as quirky sites such as Reuters' Oddly Enough)
4. Health.5. News, sports and technology sections with corresponding news feeds

You can remove the default items or add to them as you wish. You can also rearrange the content just by dragging it around the screen and subscribe to any webpage that offers RSS feeds. However, adding RSS feeds may prove to be a little challenging for non-techies, since it involves finding the feed's correct address from the website. Fortunately, guides and tips on how to do this can easily be found by searching around on the Web. Live.com also allows you to maintain multiple pages that can be easily identified by a name of your choosing. For instance, for a page that has all your friends' blogs, you can easily call the page "blogs".

The main limitation regarding e-mail integration into this service, as might be expected, is that you can only subscribe to Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail (which is also under beta testing and available to a few chosen ones). However, if you are really besotted with this website and want it to be your homepage, you can always create a Hotmail account and forward all your other e-mail addresses to it. You can also use gadgets to set e-mail options and retrieve mail from other accounts. However, the gadget used to view Hotmail accounts has limited functionality and doesn't allow you the ability to delete email among other missing features. And while there are currently no built-in gadgets for Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, new gadgets are being made daily.

One can find some really fun gadgets at www.microsoftgadgets.com, where user submitted gadgets are uploaded and featured in a gallery. You can add or download a variety of gadgets including Google search bars, Pac-Man games and picture slideshows, straight to your Live.com page.The colours and layout, however, are a little bland and do not have any interesting themes. The colours, for instance, are limited to six boring shades. Accessing the page itself also seemed a little difficult for those using dial-up connections. Hopefully this may change soon, once the site is more streamlined. What perhaps differentiates Live.com from my.msn.com is that the search engine is
supposedly more integrated and effective.

Ultimately, Live.com aims to evolve into a feature that emulates desktop applications and software. Users will apparently be able to use current software such as Outlook Express as a Web service without leaving the browser window. According to some reports, the revenue lost from software purchases once such services are offered online, will be made up through Web advertising. The end purpose is to streamline the PC and internet experience so that users can log on from wherever they want and have instant access to their files (currently limited to a maximum of two gigabytes), bookmarks, search history or whatever else they may have previously demanded from their desktop.The development of Live.com may, in fact, ultimately lead to a unified, integrated Web experience for users.

The recent establishment of Windows Live Mail, which looks alarmingly like Microsoft Outlook Express, further illustrates this point. Along, with being comparatively easy tonavigate, even for those who are not terribly well-oriented in the digital world, Yahoo! 360 and Google/ig offer far easier and more "fun" features than their Microsoft counterpart. Live.com may take a little time to catch on as a fad, since it features a somewhat more complicated interface. And while it may perhaps be a little early to say whether or not Live.com will become popular with the masses, it is safe to say that it promises in the long run to change the way we visualise and usethe internet.