Peter Griffin: One-stop-shop webpages bring order out of chaos

Navigating the web was a lot simpler a couple of years ago before MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Google's host of ingenious services caught our collective imagination.

I used to start my day by logging on to NZCity.co.nz, a home-grown start page which you can personalise with your own website links and news feeds. NZCity would take me to the various websites I visited regularly, give me the weather forecast and the news headlines.

Then came the rise of RSS (really simple syndication) feeds which meant I no longer had to visit my favourite websites to check for updates. Instead, RSS-enabled websites sent me the updates which I could ignore or click to read.

I switched to the very good RSS aggregator - Bloglines.com - which brought together all the RSS-capable websites on my radar. It meant I needed only to cast an eye over my Bloglines page to see if any of my favourite websites had been updated with new content.

But I still went elsewhere to check my email and browse the internet.

Now Bloglines has been made redundant by the ultimate personalised start page and RSS aggregator, Netvibes.com

The service takes all the useful elements of the web-email, internet search, RSS feeds, online storage, digital photos and web-based word processing and puts the interface to all of these things on one webpage.

Netvibes is just one of several personalised start page providers battling for supremacy on the web.

Many are built using Ajax - a mix of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML programming. It's a very flexible programme that allows for faster web page loading because information is constantly updated between the server where the web service is being hosted and the client you are accessing through your web browser.

Google has used Ajax extensively across its popular services like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Writely.

It means you can place lots of useful web services on one page and behind the scenes and those services will communicate with their hosts to update your information.

Netvibes has in-line email support for Gmail so my Netvibes page constantly updates my Gmail inbox without me having to start up a new window and open Gmail separately.

Yahoo Mail is also supported.

The same goes for my locally hosted POP mail account. By entering the mail server and webmail details of my email account into Netvibes, email is constantly pushed to my start page.

Netvibes will host the major search engines I choose and in separate boxes, the RSS feeds of the websites I select. To help to find RSS-capable websites - there's a directory for you to browse.

There's direct access to Google Writely, Google's useful online word processing tool, and you can set up a page to deliver pictures from your Flickr photo account or publicly available images.

Netvibes also hosts the website book marking service Delicio.us, the Ical calendar tool, Kelkoo, which lets you track the prices of goods at online retailers, your eBay account and Box.net, an online hosting service which gives you 1GB of free storage.

It's not as pretty as Live.com, Microsoft's personalised webpage service, or even Google's start page, but it's superior to both in terms of its functionality. Now I'm greeted with a tiled screen of boxes that give me an overview of all the web services and sources of information I need to use.

Services like Netvibes and its similarly useful rival Pageflakes will become much more popular. Netvibes already supports video feeds in the form of Fox Sports clips, but there's nothing to stop other sources of video being added in future.

How these services will make money is the big question. They are all provided free and advertising doesn't feature on them.

There is, however, a good opportunity for these start page providers to build pages for business users, drawing various sources from within organisations and on the web to give workers all the information they need in one place.

The shakeout in these services has already begun, but the good ones will survive because they make navigating the increasingly cluttered internet a more enjoyable experience.