Companies and Slow Releases

Protopage just released their V3 of their customer start page.

I started using Protopage as my start page near the beginning of the year as it was nice to have all me RSS feeds and links that I use daily all in one place. I would check their blog on a pretty regular basis and it seemed that things where going just fine.

Then after about 3 months I noticed that they had not posted to their blog in a while. The last post that they had done was talking about the promise of a version 3 coming out. Mean time I had noticed that a couple of other companies who had a similar service where beginning to fold (actually fold.com was one of the companies that folded – go figure).

Needless to say this concerned me and the lack of regular posting to the Protopage blog to me was not a good sign. I did a quick search over at TechCrunch to see the other companies that where doing a similar service and happened upon Netvibes. It just so happened that Netvibes had just received some VC funding so they where looking pretty healthy.

I switch to Netvibes and have been with them since.

Today I got an email from Protopage saying that they came out with V3 of there service and that I should check it out. I click on the link and found that the interface was much more pleasing then it had been before. I logged in with my user account and saw my preferences from several months back still available.

Protopage advertised the following items in the email that I started to check out:

• Instant collaboration – set a password to let others see or edit your page
• Color coded tabs and categories, to help you organize your information better
• Listen to and watch audio and video podcasts
• A new news reader, meaning you can zip through your morning news in record time
• Cartoon support – see a Dilbert cartoon directly on your page!
• 270 preloaded widgets, including 96 games, 71 finance widgets and 26 sports score widgets

After a few clicks it became apparent to me that Protopage is far more complicated then it was before. Things that were easy to do now are difficult. I had a second page setup with their blog feed on it and for the life of me I could not figure out how to get to it. After a few minutes of poking around I closed the page and will probably will not return.

There are companies that have a good model and a good flow of getting features and functions out. I looking at both Protopage and Netvibes I feel that Netvibes wins out in both. I think that Protopage was extremely slow to execute and when they finally delivered they missed the mark.

Technorati Tags: Protopage, Netvibes, Start Page, Web 2.0 , Ajax