There has been much discussion on the Net over the fact that Google has an unfair advantage over any potential competitor because of their leadership in the Internet search market.
The truth is that even though Google has been building up an amazing arsenal of online services, either developed in-house (gmail, google calendar and google maps come immediately to mind) or through acquisitions (writely and youtube, being some of the most notable so far), most users have not felt yet Google’s dominance outside the search market.
From my point, this is due to the fact that they have done a lousy job integrating all these services into a single, practical portal. Sure, you can now customize Google by clicking on the “Personalized Home” link on their home page (by the way, this link is not available for Safari users in the U.S. but seems to work fine on their British site) but this is certainly not the kind of experience I was expecting from this company. Of course, I did not expect ground breaking graphic design, as Google is known for their spartan (bandwidth saving) looks, but this portal looks just plain ugly and doesn’t offer any compelling features that will make me oversee that problem.
I recently discovered a site that offers exactly what I expect from a portal that could become my home page. That site is yourminis.com and it is simply gorgeous. Adding or removing widgets, minis or portlets (whatever you choose to call them) is very simple and is clearly based on the way Apple manages its dashboard widgets, which makes it very intuitive to Mac users. Currently there are plenty of widgets that you can place anywhere on the page and resize as you wish. Besides the well known time and weather widgets there are many games and useful services to choose from. Even if you have no use for widgets inside your browser, it is still an amazing display of what can be accomplished with Flash (not that most users would know that that is the underlying technology used by this great site).
The only problem, from my point of view, is that in order to succeed, your minis.com needs to offer a few additional minis and rethink some of their existing components. For example, the .mac mail mini shows the first twenty emails in your inbox. That is correct, the oldest twenty messages, not the most recent ones, which would have made much more sense. It would probably be even more exciting if developers could create and offer their own minis.
Until now, the web has seen a lot of competition because there simply isn’t a single site that offers almost everything to everyone. Google has been very successful developing strategic web services that are appealing to most of us. Still, today most internet users only use a couple of those services, mainly because of their poor level of integration. However, that could change quickly if Google learns from companies such as yourminis.com or even Yahoo (which despite its current woes offers a much better portal). Then, and only then, will most people realize the amazing influence that Google has over the Internet and the negative effect this can have over competition in the virtual world.
December 13th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
I’m one of the developers at yourminis.com and I wanted to thank you for the review. We are currently aware of the bug with the .mac mini and that should be fixed shortly. We’re also continuously developing new minis and are working hard to develop a public api to allow developers to create their own minis.
YourMinis also offers a ton of other features such as our browser extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3808/) which allows you to bring up yourminis.com on-top of any website and detect content from those sites (RSS feeds, movies, mp3s, pictures, microformats, etc) and add them to your page.
We also allow users to publish their pages and share them with their friends and family. We also have a community based around the shared pages. The community simplifies yourminis users’ ability to discover and share personalized tabs with others. Users can browse by category, rate tabs, share comments and add tabs to their own page.
If you have anymore problems or questions check out our forums (http://forums.yourminis.com)