This sounds an awful lot like a portal that was so popular around 2000. That’s the way it used to be. You’d setup a personal portal on Yahoo or MSN or iGoogle or whomever provided your email. Then you’d load up whatever widgets you wanted and placed them in an organized grid. News and fresh content was populated by RSS and you’d have you own personal start page on the Internet.
The goal for any portal site was to convince you to spend more time on the portal (this is how we got {Yahoo,Google} news). The more time on the portal was more ad impressions they could sell. Social media didn’t like sharing content this way and so portals became significantly less popular.
I don’t know… Google kept iGoogle around for quite a while. And the only content that wasn’t freely distributed in RSS format were things like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
Social media as a class is pretty old, even if some of the current popular players are young. What was happening with Tom from MySpace or your ex from high school was some of the only information that wasn’t available on a portal.
I don’t think the rise of one directly led to the fall of the other. The way we consume information changes over time. And as we all collectively got better at information retrieval, portals were less important. The internet also move from “one” of the places you checked for content (so efficient checking with a portal) to the primary source for news and content for many people. Now browsing the web is just as much a part of the process, especially now that we had a decade or so of practice.
And to be clear — no content creation company liked portals or aggregators. No one wanted iGoogle in between you and their own advertising. As many hits as a good HN or Digg post could get you, if you were the NYT or a news company, you would rather people start at your homepage as opposed to direct linking in. And these media companies have gotten much more sophisticated. Licensed AP news feeds were everywhere on portals. Now, a newspaper would rather keep you in their site with a subscription. Different times, different business models.
You are definitely right though — AltaVista’s front page was significantly more cluttered than the default Google page. And that was an advantage for Google. Not only did the Google page load faster, but it was less distracting. CNBC at the time couldn’t figure out how Google was going to make much money with only in-results ads. Hindsight.
But that was the era when everyone had to type in SearchEngine.com to search? Which is what makes the clean and fast Google front page so attractive.
I dont even remember when was the last time I visited Google.com Homepage to search something. It all goes through the browser. Hence why Google, despite promising to both Mozilla and Steve Jobs not building a browser, actually went ahead and build Chrome. They dont want their Search entry point to be hold by their competitor. And Apple are now extorting $10B per year just on default search engine placement.
The goal for any portal site was to convince you to spend more time on the portal (this is how we got {Yahoo,Google} news). The more time on the portal was more ad impressions they could sell. Social media didn’t like sharing content this way and so portals became significantly less popular.
I’d forgotten how much I’d missed those.