First stylish start page is AwesomeStart. It’s your favorite search engine and your very own selection of links at the bottom, infront of a pretty background. You can pick a theme from different galleries such as movies & tv, music, videogames and some miscelleanous themes. Great plus: no need to sign up! They recognize you as you by using cookies. So you better back up that cookie if you don’t want to lose your personal page.
yourminis, which collects bookmarks on a desktop-like environment, complete with calendar and other widgets. Feel free to check it out. I found it too challenging to even try.
If you are into widgets and different little windows in which you can search, view RSS Feeds, videos or pictures and your notes, but want it to be easy to maintain and without the desktop feel, there is MySurfPad, Pageflakes or iGoogle to try.
They are all pretty much the same, but Pageflakes left me with the best overall impression. Flakes are those little widgets that will bring news, tools (calculator, weather, Wikipedia, e-mail, address book), pagecasts (calendars, to-do-lists, bookmarks, clocks), entertainment (YouTube videos, Flickr photos, podcasts), and Fun (Sudoku, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) straight to your start page. Open the menu and make a selection. If your page is becoming too full, create a new one and drag&drop flakes from one page to another.
Tabmarks: You start out with a selection of ten default tabs, i.e. categories for your bookmarks. That’s also the maximum number of tabs you can add to one tabmark.
Below each tab is a list of links belonging to that tab and this list can be personalized. Click on a link and it opens underneath the tabs. To make some space, you can hide the tabs. You can personalize tabs through the Library, not through Preferences! In Preferences you can select your landing page, the overall style, and which tabs are to be shown or hidden. In the Library you can control all of that plus re-name, re-order tabs, and add a whole new “tabmarks”.
Opera has just released a competing set of developer tools called Dragonfly. They will be automatically included in Opera 9.5 beta 2 and newer versions of the browser, and you will be able to enable them by going to “Tools > Advanced > Developer Tools”.
Bookmarking and tagging websites can be a messy business. Zigtag, a new sidebar-based plugin currently in private beta, is looking to offer clean and streamlined bookmarking and tagging. The plugin differentiates itself from the multitude of other tagging services by introducing a semantic dictionary of over two million tags.
Duncan Riley will shortly announce the launch of Inquisitr, a blog covering the stuff that he is passionate about: pop culture, tech stories and various oddities that he thinks people will find interesting. You can subscribe to Inquisitr in your feed reader via this URL. You can also read Duncan’s personal blog here.
Digg competitor Mixx landed another big distribution deal. CNN.com will be adding a “Mixx It” button after every article on the site. This will be right next to the “e-mail” and “share” buttons. Last March, the Mixx bookmark button was adopted by the New York Times, but only as one of many options. Similarly, when CNN.com readers click on the “share” button, they have the option to send the story to Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. But Mixx will be highlighted as a separate
Zeer, which launched earlier today, is a product review site for food. It contains nutritional information for 114,000 food products, and each one can be rated and reviewed.
MySocial 24×7, a Friend Feed/ Twitter Firefox sidebar has launched an Adobe AIR application.
Google has added support for Notes to Google Reader, allowing users to share notes or add notes to shared stories. The add a note feature is located in the “Your Stuff” menu at the top of the Google Reader sidebar.
You already know Jeff Ma’s story. He’s the guy who led a team of MIT students to fame and fortune by counting cards at some of Vegas’s biggest casinos (the movie 21 is based on him, as is the novel Bringing Down the House). Now, Ma’s company Citizen Sports has teamed up with Sports Illustrated to bring a set of feature-rich fantasy sports apps to Facebook that Ma hopes will rival the likes of CBS Sportsline and and Yahoo Sports.
Microsoft’s i’m Initiative, which launched in March 2007, has expanded to include Hotmail