Once, a long, long time ago, I used to have Prodigy as my ISP. And even longer ago than that, they had a great home page. It was affiliated with Excite for a while. When Prodigy moved to something else as the home page screen, I stayed with Excite, but lost the special Prodigy setup they had. It was never the same after that, and when they were bought out, it became worse, IMO. Since this time, I've been in search of a new home page to greet me when I log on to the internet.
I tried the Prodigy home page when I was with them and Earthlink, who I moved to next, and I've tried my current ISP's home page, too. I've tried Yahoo and iGoogle and PageFlakes and didn't like any of them. I stayed with My Way as my home page longer than most, but even they got annoying. I hung with them because I didn't know where else to try next.
This weekend, I decided to try NetVibes. The jury's still out on what I think about them.
I like that it's customizable and that there are modules I can plug in to customize it. I like that I can create as many different tabs as I want for my data. Like the General page only has my local weather, a quote of the day thing, and a image search box. I have all my writing blogs on one tab, my non-writing blogs on another, a tab for tech news and a tab for regular news. A tab for cartoons and other fun stuff. It's nice to have it all organized, but....
The things I don't like about NetVibes is all the different tabs. Instead of just one home page where I can see everything in a glance, I now have 8 home pages and I have to click the tab for each one of them. The modules with the news/sports/entertainment stuff updates constantly and those little red numbers telling me how many unread stories I have is annoying. I think I turned them off somehow on some tabs, but it doesn't work for all tabs and I don't know why.
But I'm going to give them a month or two, maybe more because I just can't find a good home page. I don't think what I'm looking for is that unrealistic. I mean, hey, it existed in 2002 or whenever it was that Prodigy was affiliated with the old Excite.com. In the meantime, I'll keep experimenting and hoping I find something, somewhere that works for me.
