Pageflakes was first launched in 2005 in Germany, but then moved its headquarters to San Francisco. Although the company was built from private funds, it received an investment from Balderton Capital in 2006 and was later on acquired by Live Universe on April 13th, 2008.
For those of you that are just beginning to use customized homepages, Pageflakes might be just the right choice. It has an easy to use drag and drop function, an appealing default template, and adding widgets, or as they call them – “flakes” – is really a piece of cake. Just pick any of your favorite news feeds, videos, pictures, or anything else you might find necessary, and add them to your flakes, or create your own custom flakes. In addition, you can also access publicly shared homepages, which are called “Pagecasts”.
Pageflakes customized homepages are also used by small businesses for shared message boards and calendars, as well as for managing customer information and projects. In addition, it also allows third party module-creation, which is actually a compulsory feature more than a big plus, since Microsoft and Google also have this feature.
However, a lot of users complained back in 2008 when there were a few days when they could not connect to the service. Unfortunately, this episode has repeated several times and there are a lot of comments on Twitter from people wondering if Pageflakes is actually dead and buried or if they could at least get their content back. Sadly, there is no one on Twitter to address these complaints, so a lot of people have joined Netvibes instead. I guess it just remains to be seen if Pageflakes will make full recovery or not.
