Pageflakes was an

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

-based

startpage A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. The term may also refer to the start page shown in a web browser when the application software, application first opens. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's ...

or personal

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayi ...

similar to Netvibes,

My Yahoo! My Yahoo! is a start page or web portal which combines personalized Yahoo! features, content feeds and information. The site was launched in 1996 and was one of the company's most popular creations. Applications of My Yahoo My Yahoo’s purpose i ...

, Myhomepage,

iGoogle iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) was a customizable Ajax-based start page or personal web portal launched by Google in May 2005. It was discontinued on November 1, 2013,Google SupportiGoogle's Decommission/ref> because the compan ...

, and Microsoft Live that operated from 2005 until January 2012. The site was organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes. Each Flake varied in content; information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast,

del.icio.us Delicious (stylized del.icio.us) was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, ...

bookmarks,

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

photos, social networking tools like

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, email and user-created modules. Pagecasts allowed users to share their pages publicly, allowing them to share a curated page of content that would be of interest to others (in essence a widget-based precursor to pages shared through content sharing sites such as Pinterest).Pageflakes had 250,000 Flakes and over 130,000 Pagecasts.

History

Pageflakes was launched at the end of 2005. The site began in Germany, but was headquartered in San Francisco,

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

. The company was initially privately funded. Balderton Capital (originally Benchmark Capital Europe) invested an undisclosed amount in May 2006. Dan Cohen was appointed CEO in January 2007. Pageflakes was acquired by LiveUniverse in 2008.

Underlying Technology

Some of the major components used for building the framework were

ASP.NET ASP.NET is an open-source, server-side web-application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, applications and services. The name s ...

2.0, including the

ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX, formerly called Atlas, is a set of extensions to ASP.NET developed by Microsoft for implementing Ajax functionality. It is released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). Clients supporting Ajax ASP.NET AJAX runs on the follow ...

components, and JavaScript. However developers building flakes could use a more diverse toolset.

References

External links

PC Magazine article from March 2008KTVZ News Channel 21 from March 2008
News aggregators Web portals Internet properties established in 2005 2005 establishments in Germany {{web-stub

History

Underlying Technology

See also

References

External links