New Startpage Contender Yourminis

Yourminis is the second service by San Diego based company Goowy Media which launched this week, just in time for the San Francisco Web 2.0 conference. I would have probably overlooked this company but luckily I have seen Robert Scoble mentioning it on his blog yesterday.

Yourminis is a startpage service similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes. Oh no, just another startpage! Though fear not. I think it is powerful enough to rival its well known competitors. At first glance it’s not special in any way. The usual widgets, Goowy call them minis just to confuse you even more, which you can arrange on the site and on multiple tabs. Also you can add your own RSS feeds. Standard.

So what distinguishes it from other startpages? It is completely Flash based which makes it rather simple to arrange minis. You can even overlap them. There is also an extension for Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer available. While browsing any site you can click on the extension’s symbol and you have your minis right in front of you as a webtop and you are still on the same site. In think this is a feature which helps Yourminis really standing out from the crowd.
All in all a very slick looking site and great service. Watch out for it.

For more information see the interview (and short demo) with Goowy’s CEO Alex Bard on PodTech.

Edit: Re-reading this posting I cannot believe that I have forgot to mention some very interesting features. I had two versions of the article saved on Docs & Spreadsheets and used the early version here. Doh! So here is the rest in listed form.

1. The Flickr mini allows to have a slideshow on your webtop. You can drag each photo from the slideshow to your webtop and also use the photo as a wallpaper for your webtop.
2. While surfing the net the browser extension indicates wether the site has a RSS feed. You can add the feed automatically to Yourminis.
3. If the site features MP3s they are listed as a mini on the webtop. You can either download or stream the files. Excellent!