"ESPN ala Webwag"

(Désolé pour les Francophones, je me fais l'echo ici d'un débat qui nait aux US suite au lancement d'une version Ajax du célèbre portail de sport ESPN. Ils ont aussi une TV, d'où leurs widget video. La question étant de savoir si les sites medias vont oui ou non lancer leur version personalisable "My" de leur site. Le débat est ouvert dans les commentaires.)



Since the popular sport portal ESPN launched this week a Webwag-like version of the site, an interesting debate is spreading the US blogosphere these days. See for example "ESPN, Netvibes and Webwag" or on Mashable.com "ESPN this week launched their own startpage ala Netvibes, Pageflakes, Webwag.' 

The questions is, do the tradional media sites will widely launch an Webwag-styled and Ajax-version of their site ? My gut feeling is yes they will. Because Webwag and its peers have created a brand new way of surfing the web such as mouse-over feeds preview, mini-windows, open-source developers' widgets created from the Factory, live TV broadcasting widgets close to my email inbox etc...Once you have experienced these features, you're defintively addictive to it, and I think the ESPN guys are the first of a long media sites list to catch the trend and as a leader it is a smart move for ESPN. Media sites will have to follow the trend or see their traffic declining, especially if their respective direct competitors launch rapidely a "My" version of their domain.

What do you think ? Do you think the Webwagization of the media web sites has begun or not ?

Comments

[Rédigé par: haydn]

Franck - one of your achievements is also a default page for webwags that has a European cultural feel to it. Pity you're defaulting techcrunch of course.

Mais en francais, vos concepts ont de vraies perspicacités.Je pense que l'internet va dans votre direction. un bon nombre des sites avec de nombreux visiteurs adoptant des pages de début

[Rédigé par: Emre Sokullu]

I think startpages are everywhere. For instance, in Grou.ps, we offer a feature called PermaHome, which gives users a custom view of their grou.p, it's like Webwag, Netvibes or PageFlakes. It's still very primitive though.

But we consider outsourcing this to startpages like you. So users will just click on "export this to webwag", they'll be redirected your web site, and their grou.p will be yet another tab of their startpage. I think that's the right way and any site that considers this approach (including espn) should do that, and leave this to the professionals, so you guys...

[Rédigé par: Pat Coyle]

I do agree that fans want to organize pages their own ways and we're building that function into the Colts Fan Network (scheduled to launch in about a month). And I can definitely see why ESPN would get into the startpage game. We noticed (last season) that over 100,00 fans set colts.com as their home page, so we test marketed this exact concept last with a product called Colts Lifepage. We tried to charge for it, but it fell flat.

[Rédigé par: haydn]

Emre - I have a little site that would benefit from a grouping facility. Maybe you'd take a look see if your poduct fits. www.mydietfriends.com. Would love to see it as part of a webwags start page too.

[Rédigé par: Emre Sokullu]

Haydn - thanx for your interest. Yes, we're targeting groups like yours. There, your group members can share their links, photos, blogs without duplicate maintenance efforts - you just specify your individual accounts and we aggregate them all. However, we're still alpha, so it's not production ready yet, a bit glitchy and there are some usability problems. You may start using it and heating up but we'll be ready with the beta relese which should come out in 3-4 months. We're working hard on it.

[Rédigé par: Franck Poisson]

> Pat & Haydn, Good to read your chat here. Play with your APIs guys and see what we can do for our Webwaggers. (API at wwww.factory.webwag.com)

[Rédigé par: lsitda epkwuany]

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