Appatic

When you think about a Startpage service, you more than likely will immediately think of MyYahoo, iGoogle, Live Home, MyAol, Netvibes or Pageflakes.  What any of these have in common is that they are the most used Startpages (in the order i put them) and that there is a Widget factor to display information, games, news or other interactive content in them.

Start.io thinks that the Widget based Startpages are too complicated and that Startpages should return to their roots. When they were only simple html pages with live bookmarks (Activity monitored links like in Firefox) on them.

That is the whole concept behind Start.io. A Stylized page with different categorized sets of live bookmarks. If you hover a link, it will show in a tooltip if there is recent activity by counting how many new entries are in that page it is linking.  You need a account and after you have one it sets you a short linked startpage like this: start.io/username

You can then add some categories, customize your links and the style of your page look from 9 predefined styles or make your own custom style.

To make it easier to set up. You can import your links from a exported bookmarks file from your browser or import a OPML file from you Feedreader of choice. If  later on you decide Start.io is not for you. but you have manually setup your links, you can export them out the same way.

Start.io sets a long lasting cookie so you will be always logged to your Start.io account once you are in. The part of setting it up as the browser startpage is actually up to you to do manually.

While the idea is almost TOO SIMPLE. It got some good merits to it. The only things i would like it to have are: (1) a automatic browser startpage setup (why i do have to do that manually?), (2) that the links had dropdowns and counters just like in the Firefox Live Bookmarks bar and (3) that there were more page styles to choose from.  Would it also kill it to have Video DEMO’s and actual live examples for previewing the service?.

Forcing a user to setup a a account just to check out the service is a horrible practice that only results in unused dummy tests.

Linkage

Start.io

Start.io About    <—Service Info

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*Edited* (10/02/2010)