Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo

By Rafe Needleman – February 15, 2007 12:18 PM PST

Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Pageflakes' new CEO, Dan Cohen. Pageflakes makes a "single page aggregator" service. It's a good site to use as your home page. You can add RSS feeds, widgets, and all sorts of content to the page, and you can set up multiple tabs on your site for different categories of content. [See previous Webware coverage.]

Pageflakes' special power is its community focus. You can easily share your page layouts with other people and even let them modify your pages. Cohen sees Pageflakes as a good service for groups or clubs: people can collect resources from the around the Web to make them available to all their members. Not a bad idea.

Can a small site like Pageflakes compete against Yahoo's configurable home page, My Yahoo (or Google, AOL, or Microsoft)? Cohen admitted that the number of users on his service is quite low. He also said his other upstart competitors (NetVibes, YourMinis, etc) aren't doing much better. But he said his work experience at Google and Yahoo has given him insight into what works and doesn't. And, he believes Pageflakes benefits from being a smaller company. Due to his company's focus and nimbleness, he said, he can build a better mousetrap, and do it faster. One thing he'll never be able to fight is Yahoo's marketing reach, though.

If you want more than what the big sites' start pages offer, Pageflakes is worth checking out. I use its competitor, NetVibes, and I really like it, but they function similarly. Both have a lot of fancy modules you can put on your pages, but I just use them to read my RSS feeds. There is one key difference: Pageflakes loads more quickly.

Play the video for more.