Today Pete had an article about the financial viablility of web based “home page” services such as Netvibes, Protopage, Favoor and others. Personally, I haven’t figured out what the usefulness is, myself. I just don’t get them.

My first peeve about web home pages is that they take a long time to load. I don’t use any page as a default in my browser. When I open a browser, I generally am after some kind of information and I already know the url I’m headed for, or I am going to Google to find it. I want the browser to open fast so I can get where I’m going. Few things annoy me more than if the browser has a home page specified and I have to wait for it to load before I can even type in my url (it will overwrite what I’ve typed once it finishes loading the page and I’ll just have to type it again unless I’m patient). And web home pages take a long time to load because of all the widgets and modules.

My second peeve is that I don’t gain anything from another RSS aggregator and there aren’t really any other useful widgets. I have RSS feeds funneled to my mail service so that I only have to go one place for incoming information. Yes, I know I can set up my “home page” to have a widget to view my inbox but I still have to click on it to open my mail program so what’s the point? As for other widgets, I don’t have time to play games and I don’t need the weather reports (I can look out the window).

Which leads to my last peeve: widget screen real estate is so limited for the useful tools (like search, inbox or even flickr feeds) on home pages that I don’t want to use those tools on the home page. I’d much prefer to use those tools on their native sites so that I can focus on them and the task at hand without the distraction of other stuff on the page and the limitation of having to scroll for full functionality.

So, I haven’t figured out a good reason to use these services. And this is an opinion of a very techy/geeky/early adopter type person… Isn’t it way too complicated for the “average” guy who’s still daunted by (if even aware of) RSS feeds? I will be surprised if any of these services survive the next year or two, with the possible exception of the early players in the space (such as Netvibes) just because of the novelty.

I’d like to hear of some innovative uses for these things… Maybe they’d be useful as a way to aggregate info and “share” it with others? Ehh, no… SuperGlu, PeopleFeeds and Squidoo bascially do that… What else could you do with them? Anyone have some suggestions?