Your start page says a lot about you. Do you like tons of information flying your way - or do you like to keep it short and simple? I recently got the chance to have a quick chat with one of the leaders in the start page arena Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes. From taking the start page idea of out Pageflakes to what his favorite pagecasts are - I tried to cover it all with minimal fluff.
How important is user feedback and experiences (good and bad) when it comes to the Pageflakes product?
Dan: It’s extremely important and we have ongoing dialogues with our users through the blog and support forum. We monitor this full time and read & respond to every email. Our product plans include user requested information by way of reviews and feedback. We always have a representative from customer services support team involved in our product sessions.
This is to not only know how our site is produced & written, understanding sessions etc but also to represent the user base and their comments/suggestions into our future plans. They aggregate the most popular requests and common denominator feedback so we acknowledge this as paramount in our product plans. Ongoing dialogue internally and with our users are taken extremely seriously into our product design development strategies.
Start pages have a history of being something that people spend five minutes on, get caught up on whatever they want to watch - clocks or kitten saying funny things. Why should somebody invest the time to spend more time with Pageflakes?
Dan: A great number of users spend more time on Pageflakes than email and social networking sites. The old generation of personalize pages i.e. my Yahoo would result in people clicking for a moment and then visiting another site. But the old RSS information was sports, news and stocks related so if the user wanted to read more, they’d click through or venture to other websites.
With Pageflakes, users can check bank balances, email, network, visit social networking flakes so the interactive elements on Pageflakes is richer and includes flakes that users couldn’t do before. We are revolutionizing what people are doing on the Web. Technology has changed and Pageflakes is more of an engaging experience by definition to keep users on the page longer. They are learning and digging deeper into topics individually and interacting with other like minded individuals.
Focusing your attention to several new projects to aim your pages at a lot of niche audiences (like what you plan to do with education) do you hope to move the project along further than that 5 minute or less eyeball viewing time most start pages get?
Dan: Reiterating the above again, people are using Pageflakes longer than 5 minutes. This is their environment and not just a website. Pageflakes has been active within the educational community globally for 15 months so what we are doing is not just attracting a niche audience, but letting the users create an entire community of say, teachers. They use Pageflakes in the classroom, share through private collaborations and have students visit the pagecasts regularly for assignment updates.
It’s a group product service. We support them and thrive on this grown in the new education paradigm. Pageflakes has been involved with thousands of schools in the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and more. Earlier this year, Pageflakes won a Gartner Award in the Enterprise Category.
This is a reflection on companies who also use Pageflakes as their new internal portal for projects, management, tracking industry research etc. Small businesses use Pageflakes to promote themselves i.e. SoulSistah100 who’s music is basically her business. Companies now use their Pageflakes home page on their business card as a primary example of the work they’ve produced.
From your history at both Yahoo and Google, you have obviously seen what works and what does not work. How have your past experiences helped shape the way you’d like to brand and mold Pageflakes going into the future?
Dan: Past experiences have shown what users want and don’t want in personalized start pages. I now have the opportunity to focus exclusively on delivering the best home page and experience to our users. In terms of shaping and branding, we have simply given the users an incredible set of tools to build their homepage and share with others in a simple and easy format. Our user shave really shaped Pageflakes future for education, business and social networking. We gave them the tools to make their own themes, logos, photos and their own branding experiences.
In the past, products working well were part of an overall company strategy with various different priorities alternating and interlinking. With Pageflakes we get to focus on one thing and excel in this as a true mass market innovator and user driven product initiative that our users can enjoy, personally and professionally.
What are some of Dan’s favorite flakes and pagecasts?
Dan: My pagecast is http://www.pageflakes.com/dancohen and obviously this is my favorite pagecast. I’m also interested in our user’s pagecasts such as SoulSistah100 and nancypants. These users take Pagecasting to new heights, for personal use and business.
I like to see what all users are producing and it’s fascinating to live and visit their lives i.e. what it’s like to be a housewife in Calgary with 4 children, an educator in Scotland or a singer in Osaka, Japan. It’s fun to experience their personas and a bonus for other Pageflakes users to explore.
I also like viewing our new series of open Pageflakes Pagecasts that we’ve produced incorporating flakes from our community section, seasonally and ongoing such as Christmas, UK New Years and our exciting new Super Bowl 2008 pagecast. These are an ongoing campaign that are not only fun but extremely useful for information gathering, copying flakes and you don’t need to be a Pageflakes user to visit these.
I regularly check my universal video search (listed on my pagecast) along with updates on music with a weekly podcast. And local events for my family and I to enjoy this one.
I want to thank Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes for giving me a few free minutes of his busy day to ask questions people actually want to know the answers to.
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