Personalized desktop pages have been a popular as various players have grown market share, and others have failed. Providers like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and iGoogle have a passionate user base – nearly 40 million people a month visit My Yahoo alone (Comscore worldwide, January 2008). So many of these popped up by the end of 2005 that we stopped paying attention.
As is often the case though, when an idea becomes popular enough, the barrier to entry often decreases as at first people try to design their own versions, then later you can buy a script that does the same thing. This auction on Sitepoint is offering an “Ajax DeskTop StartPage Enterprise website (like PageFlakes, Netvibes & iGoogle! )” with a starting price of $90. You can test the service youself at Mevou.com.
So what does $90 buy? It’s not as polished as the existing players, but it’s usable. Customizable widgets are offered next to theme and wallpaper support and page customization options. Except for a lack of depth in the widget offering, the experience in using this script wasn’t that much different from similar sites.
I’m not qualified to say that $90 is cheap for the script (it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be found elsewhere for less) but one thing is certain: here comes the personalized desktop page clone army.