Pageflakes is an Ajax

Ajax (programming)

Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...

-based startpage or personal web portal

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

 similar to Netvibes

Netvibes

Netvibes is a personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web including digital life management, widget distribution services and brand observation rooms.-History:The company was founded by Tariq Krim and Florent Frémont in 2005.-Technology:...

, My Yahoo!, iGoogle

IGoogle

iGoogle , a service of Google, is a customizable Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal . Google originally launched the service in May 2005...

, Wikpage and Microsoft Live

Microsoft Live

The following Microsoft services have been branded with the word "Live":* Windows Live, a set of services and software products mainly aimed at individuals* Microsoft Office Live, a set of services aimed at small businesses...

. The site is organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes. Each Flake varies in content; information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast, del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...

 bookmarks, Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

 photos, social networking tools like Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

, email and user-created modules. Pageflakes has 250,000 Flakes and over 130,000 Pagecasts (publicly shared pages created by users with individual URLs).

History

Pageflakes was launched at the end of 2005. The site began in Germany, but is now headquartered in San Francisco, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The company was initially privately funded. Balderton Capital (originally Benchmark Capital) invested an undisclosed amount in May 2006. Dan Cohen was appointed CEO in January 2007.

Underlying Technology

Some of the major components used for building the framework are ASP.NET

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a Web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic Web sites, Web applications and Web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages ...

 2.0, including the ASP.NET AJAX components, and JavaScript. However developers building flakes can use a more diverse toolset.

PageFlakes had a major outage on Failure Friday 30 January 2009 as noted by CNET.
PageFlakes had another major outage on Friday 29 October 2010 that lasted until Monday November 1 2010.
PageFlakes had another major outage, started on Friday November 5 2010.

External links

• Pageflakes Homepage
• Pageflakes Company Page
• Gallery of all available Flakes
• PC Magazine article from March 2008
• KTVZ News Channel 21 from March 2008
• Drop Things An open source portal created by Omar AL Zabir (co-founder and CTO of Pageflakes) for a book he wrote on the subject.
• Omar wrote a book "Building Web 2.0 Portal using ASP.NET 3.5" where he shows how to build such a portal that can withstand millions of hits. He talks about many performance, scalability and production challenges that are important for any high volume website. The book is available from O'Reilly and also at Amazon
• Flake Developers
• Pageflakes Press Center