I posted a while back complaining about the lack of quality Web desktops 
despite the fact that they’re multiplying like rabbits. For a more complete list, see Mike Arrington’s PageFlakes review. On the advice of one of their employees, I’ve been using PageFlakes for the past few days. Overall it’s a pretty good product, but I’ll be going back to Google as my homepage for the simple reason that it’s fast and I have QUICK access to search as soon as I fire up my browser. Other than that, here are my thoughts:
Pros
- Nice clean interface
- I love the ability to add custom notes to a page
- The biggest variety of widgets I’ve seen in an online desktop
- Flickr integration
- Del.icio.us integration (including clouds)
- OPML support
- Drag and drop widgets from one page to another
- Nice feed reading interface
Cons
- Their support crew wasn’t able to tell me if my GMail password is stored in encrypted format, so I didn’t feel safe even testing their GMail integration
- Javascript errors in Internet Explorer 6.0
- Didn’t work at all in the Flock browser
- Some quirky CSS display issues with feeds
- Takes a long time to load (anywhere from 4 to 15 seconds by my watch)
That last one’s a big deal. I don’t think this market realizes that if you’re going to be somebody’s home page, you have to load quickly. This is a big gripe of mine with just about every Web desktop out there. I want to make it my home page, but when I fire up my browser I usually have a purpose in mind, and I don’t want to wait more than a second or two for the search box to pop up. I don’t care if I have to wait for everything else on the page to load, but make that search box POP.
Overall, however, I think PageFlakes is probably the most feature-complete Web desktop I’ve seen. If they can fix the loading time, Javascript errors, and address my security concerns I’ll probably go back and start using them on a regular basis.
