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The RSS experiment: Pageflakes

First off, I have to apologize for the debabblog hiatus. My wife and I had a lovely 10 days across the "pond", and catching up took a bit more time than I anticipated (as always). Unless you count by actual weeks, this is week #7 in The Great RSS Experiment, and this week's subject was Pageflakes. Much like Netvibes, Pageflakes is a RSS reader and personalized home-page hybrid, and has a very Web 2.0 look and feel.

Maybe Pageflakes was a little too much like Netvibes, or maybe this RSS experiment is finally wearing on me, but even though Pageflakes had some solid features, I found myself not using it much. Ultimately, I think Pageflakes had a few too many bells and whistles, making it a bit too distracting. Here's the breakdown, though:

Usability: 2/4 I can't quite put my finger on it, but Pageflakes just seemed harder to use than Netvibes, which I can't help but compare it to. In terms of basic layout and functionality, they're very similar, but some of the day-to-day functions, such as easily marking entries as read, were noticeably missing. Pageflakes also has an odd personality split: you can either use it as a more traditional RSS reader or incorporate the individual feeds as items (or "flakes", as they call them). On the surface, that would seem like a plus, but it caused me some confusion, especially during setup. My imported feeds, for example, went into the reader and didn't appear as individual items.

Features: 3/4 Pageflakes does have a solid feature set, and it's personalized home-page modules, such as weather, seemed solid. It does allow a lot of customizability, in terms of placement, number of entries displayed for each feed, how feeds open (in a reader, same window, new window), etc. The individual items seem to take up more space than on Netvibes, but this was primarily due to design conventions. Pageflakes has a bit slicker, more attractive design; whether or not that's a plus or minus depends on the person, I suppose.

Pageflakes Recap
This may just come down to using Netvibes first, but comparing the two directly, I found Pageflakes less usable, at least in the small details. It's a solid tool, but just wasn't quite a match for the way I wanted to use it. If you like Web 2.0 style applications, and want a reader/home-page hybrid, I'd suggest giving both Pageflakes and Netvibes a try and deciding for yourself.

Next week, I'll be deciding whether or not this is the last reader in the RSS experiment. I have a couple on deck, but they're not really readers so much as feed tools (like Yahoo! Pipes). If I don't review another tool, I'll do a recap next Friday of all of the reviews.

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