Poking Holes in Start Pages with Pageflakes’ CEO
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.
