A "Web Dashboard" I am working on....

Let's say you do come up with some new twist on the whole web desktop thing. There is absolutely no technological barrier to entry for that market. Any of the existing products can add on your differentiating feature in a week, and then crush you.

If you're working on this as a neat hack, I'm all for it, but if you think this is going to turn into a viable business somehow, I think you're probably mistaken.

What you may have missed is the small tab in the top right - clicking on this gives you a set of scrollers with which you scroll the page to a desired area and save that position, so like I said before you could navigate to the yahoo finance page scroll to where they show a graph of a share price and save that coordinate.

Save the layout and everytime you log on and view your regular pages for your info fix it becomes a lot easier/faster.

you say a saved set of firefox tabs would work better but would you be able to access that from another machine other than your own?

Also I am not saying my idea is original - very few are nowadays; what I am trying to achieve is something that is "better" - easy to use, more functional, accessible, and more importantly has potential to evolve into something greater.

I realise that the only barrier for entry at the moment is lack of technical expertise (which isn't huge at all), but surely if that isn't any form of barrier why don't a bunch of guys from this forum group up together apply their collective technical knowledge and build a google killer?! - you make it sound as though a technological barrier to entry is no barrier at all.

I do not see this as my defining piece of work that will make me millions - that is exactly why I haven't jacked in my day job and pursued this full-time.

I'll be succinct on my motives for doing this:-

a) My day job as an IT consultant isn't rewarding/challenging enough

b) I don't want to join the rat race and not be able to pursue my interests due to financial burdens, ie mortgage, family, etc

c) There's no point in me dreaming up ideas in my head, messing around on my pc if I'm never going to publish it in the real world - however good/bad

d) most people never make it big with their first idea - I expect it to fail.

e) This is more of a learning process on how to get something out there, than on creating a money spinner.

At this moment in time, yes I regard this as more of a hack than a viable business solution, more precisely an experimentation of a concept.

Yes kind of, I first had the idea over a year ago, when I realised everytime I log on I visit the same few sites to do web-housekeeping stuff first (news, email, share-prices, etc) before I would do what I initially logged on to do. I thought it would be great to have all this at my fingertips in one place.

But it had to be easily accessible, from any machine, therefore browser-based not a desktop app, applet or anything else. I've tried to keep it really simple and focus on the technical issues to see if the idea is feasible. Therefore I'm resisting the urge to over-engineer it as much as possible (technology lust I think you call it!).

Yes netvibes, yahoo pipes, and others would be competitors I guess. But the problem with netvibes I find is that it is time intensive to set up, and you can only access "adapted content",

I want something that is easy to use and therefore accessible. more importantly be able to incorporate any kind of information published on the web (text,audio,video,graphics) regardless of whether it is an rss/atom feed or available in xml format.

I've only shown/talked about my idea to a handful of people thought I would get some wider feedback even at the risk of divulging my 'big idea'!

What are you working on if you don't mind me asking?

I know little about mobile websites, but isn't their content stripped down? Just looked at m.yahoo.com for the first time.

Good luck taking on the tabs.

an idea I've had for a while now - a web dashboard/web portal. This is very much work in progress, but the idea is that you add windows to the dashboard from the toolbox. You set the URL and size/position of the window. Each window points to a different site, and then you save the layout.

This then acts as your homepage or portal to the web where you can view your favourite/common sites at a glance. For example if you are an amateur investor with a small portfolio you can have windows to yahoo finance and get share prices/graphs of you stock. If you're a YouTube-aholic your fave videos are all laid out on one dashboard. Once saved anyone could then access it with a fixed url.

I'm moonlighting on this, lots of techy issues to resolve still but what do you reckon?

PS. to mess around with it click to top icon in the tool box to create a window enter url, drag and resize windows to create your dashboard (text boxes buttons at the top are not in use!).

Thanks

wr1472

Do you see yourself competing with Netvibes et al?