Sonet Journal

Personal Web Pages - The Big Three

It’s the age of personalisation and the big three are all at it - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. I have tried them all just to get an idea what they are like and how usable they are.
I started with Google and signed up with their Personal Page through Google Labs. It’s not bad it lets you add links and content you frequent most but requires that you have a gmail address in order to access it. If anyone wants to try it let me know and i’ll send them a gmail invite.

Google personal pages is not the most exciting I have seen but as mentioned it is a good place to store links. I keep it just to store my Google links to their services and a few news items.

Yahoo’s My Web is a bit more interesting than Google’s. First of all it gives more flexibility in saving pages and the layout is a lot nicer and user friendly. It’s almost like having your own news sheet and what to read. It’s still in Beta and not quite ready yet. It gives three options to view your pages - yourself - Your Community - Everyone - I think that this is only going to be viewable if you are a member of the Yahoo network - everyone means all on the network.

Windows Live - I tried this a few hours ago and I must say its layout is cleaner than the above two with crisper colours that can be customised to a certain extent. Actually customised is too flexible a word I would say gives a few choices for colouring the bar.

In my opinion Windows Live came a sound first place for usability and enjoyment. There are so many plug-ins (gadgets) that are being made for just about every subject under the sun, RSS readers, live webcam, calculators, tv guides, you name it…
It’s easy enough to create the plug-ins or rather gadgets (as they are called) if you have a little programming experience everything is there for you.

I still think there are many modules missing from the custom pages to make them truly customisable and all three providers could use some serious work to realise this. Items like uploading content and images would be helpful and a little more flexibility on customisation.

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Related Reading:
Windows Live
Yahoo My Web
Google Personal Pages

Monday 21st November 2005, the W3C released it’s Hosts Feed Validation Service that is a free online tool in the same vein as it’s other validations tools such as HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) validators.
The service is free and open to use by developers of syndication feeds such as Atom and RSS. The W3C Feed Validation now adds a SOAP based web service interface for interactive programming.
The service is based on the open source software feedvalidator (the software running the service at feedvalidator.org).

As olivier Thereaux announced in a letter to the W3C community:

This service is, for the moment, still quite experimental, and may
have bugs or problems… Since the underlying software
feedvalidator is not developed at W3C, reports of software bugs
could, and should, be sent to the sourceforge mailing-list

As the web moved on into it’s next generation of becming even more service orientated and applications become more web based, these tools are becoming more and more neccessary to ensure that any development work is validated for cross-browser and usability issues.

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Related Reading:
W3C Feed Validation
Source Forge Feed Validator Project
Atom Publishing Format and Protocol (atompub)