How do you quickly reach your favorite websites?
Like me, you certainly have 5-10 websites that you are visiting several times a day. For my part, those are Facebook, CNN, Perez Hilton, Jean-Marc Morandini’s blog (a blog about media in France), Google and Wordreference (for French to English translations). Most often it is a very quick visit: just checking for new stuff or searching for something.
To access quickly to these websites I bookmarked them in my browser and every time I need them, I click on my bookmarks, load the whole pages, check for updates or enter my search request, and leave. I got used to it and I used to follow this pattern more than ten times a day. But thinking about it, it would be much more useful to get all these six websites gathered in one page. Actually, I am not interested in the whole pages but just part of it. For Facebook, I am just checking notifications, for CNN just checking the top stories, for Perez Hilton and Jean-Marc Morandini websites the latest fancy news, for Google and Wordreference I just use the search bars. So if I could gather all these information on my browser homepage for instance, that would make my life simplier: everytime I start my browser I could directly look at the information I need the most.
A few months ago, a friend told me that there were services that purpose is precisely to personalise my homepage with my favourite information or web services. I tried one of them and was positively surprised that it was almost what I was looking for. The service was perfect for my use of Facebook and Google because there were dedicated modules to these services (I learnt that those are called widgets). For CNN I found a module with the latest news, which is also exactly what I was looking for. However, for Perez Hilton, Jean-Marc Morandini’s blog and Wordreference I did not found what I was looking for. For Perez Hilton, the module was displaying only the latest posts whereas I was mostly interested by the video or the picture that is enclosed in each post. For Jean-Marc Morandini and Wordreference, I did not find any module. I still need to open ‘manually’ three of my six favourite websites !
November 16th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Hi !
Well, I am sorry to be a disturber… but why don’t you use something like RSS/Atom Feeds ???
You can check some in G.Kawasaki global feeds aggregation website:
http://my.alltop.com/
Elsewhere, something like a simple webbot could be nice !
Bye
November 16th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Hi Fabien.
Hi am taking the lead on this one, Jen is not geek enough to answer you
.
Well RSS or Atom are great for being updated with the latest news from a blog for instance. However, you have to use a RSS reader/or know about RSS (and most people don’t). Moreover, I would agree that it would solve Jen problem for Morandini’s blog. But not for Perez Hilton and Wordreference.
What you call webbot is a web crawler right ? It can be used to check your links or to be alerted when something new happens. Well I agree that could be nice. But I won’t be the one setting it on Jen’s computer
…
November 17th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Hi Rodolphe !
Yes, I know I sometimes think as a geek… For example, I don’t use a RSS Reader, I’ve make my own. So I can have some alert about some website that I follow (It is by this way I’ve to know you aswered to this post).
I don’t know, but your last 2 blog post seems to justify your marketing approch… and some of our arguments are not really famous (for me, but if is it, I’m not your target)… but I’m not a web marketing specialist !