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PageFlakes is a personalized startup page, just like Netvibes. The company is backed by the same team that founded Alondo.de, a German auction service that later became eBay Germany after eBay acquired it. Another common aspect between Netvibes and PageFlakes is that both have European roots, with Netvibes being founded in France and PageFlakes in Germany. PageFlakes recently released a new version of their personalized homepage codenamed “Flurry”. The new version has tons of new features and massive usability improvements. Lets go through them one at a time.

Customization Wizard
One of the biggest improvements is the Welcome Wizard, which really eases the process of customizing your page from scratch. All you need to do is to tell the Wizard your interests and location and it automatically generates a recommended startup page.

So if you are a technology news freak and live around San Francisco, PageFlakes will automatically generate a page similar to the one below. Google has recently launched a similar auto-generated recommendations feature for its personalized homepage. The idea is to give the user an initial set of options to start with, so he does not have to guess or wonder what to do. If a user has a really exciting page and want to share it with others, he can do so by clicking “Share” and the page will be published in the Public Pages Gallery.

RSS Reader
The RSS Reader has been significantly improved in the Flurry release. The reader now fetches and displays images as well, along with the plain ol html. Every page now has a “Reader” link at the top right of the page, clicking which will open a special News Reader, that is almost similar in look, feel and functionality as the Google Reader. Feeds in the new Reader could be viewed in Newspaper View-displaying all articles in one large virtual piece of paper, or Website View-displaying articles in a way they are displayed on the publishing sites. Articles could be saved for later reading and could be navigated quickly using keyboard shortcuts.

News and Blog Search
The Flurry release has added two exciting new flakes, the Universal News Search Flake and the Universal Blog Search Flake. The flakes allow you to search for fresh news and blog posts from around the web. All you need to do is type in the keyword and hit search and all the matching news and blog posts will be displayed along with thumbnail images. New items will automatically be fetched and displayed on each visit to the page.

Blogging Baked Right In
Due to popular demand from users to somehow use their public pages as a blog, PageFlakes now has a Blog Flake. As the publisher of the page you can write and edit posts, and visitors of the page could leave comments. The Blog Flake offers a WYSIWYG text editor with numerous formatting options.

With the new release PageFlakes has catched up with Netvibes in the user space. In the developer space however Netvibes enjoys a huge lead specially with the release of the Universal Widget API. PageFlakes now needs to focus on building partnerships and alliances, yet another area where Netvibes is thriving, to rapidly increase its user base.