Protopage.com is a website that offers free personal start pages. With a Protopage start page, users can have all their most commonly viewed sites and RSS feeds in one place.
The Good
Protopage.com allows a user to place just about anything that you commonly view in one place. All you have to do is sign up so that you can save your settings. Once you’re set up, all you have to do is sign in on any computer and view your start page from anywhere! If one page isn’t enough (let’s face it, it isn’t) then you can add multiple tabs.
Users can choose to add one of the many widgets offered by Protopage, their own favorite RSS feeds, or any other website. For instance, on my page I have one tab with my 3 email addresses and Dilbert, while each of the other tabs represent different social networks and deal a day sites that I frequent. Since my Protopage is set as my home page, it’s nice to have all of these things come up when I open Firefox.
The look of the site is user customizable also. Users can change the color scheme, background, and location of tabs, among other features. Also, Protopage has many popular search engines built in for easy search. This feature is currently built into both Firefox and IE7, but it never hurts to have them in another location.
The Bad
Protopage takes up some of your screen real estate with its header. It’s not a ton, but it can limit what you see on a website, causing more scrolling than you’re accustomed to. Also, it does not work perfectly with all sites. For instance, one of my email sites will allow me to see previews of my mail, but I cannot open the messages and it is not showing any of the messages as being “read” so each message adds to the list new mail even after it has been read.
When you use Protopage to keep up with more than one email from the same site (say Gmail) you can only open emails from whichever account was last signed into and saved. It will still check the other account, however, so it’s useful to see the new emails to that account.
The Bottom Line
Protopage is not for everyone, and has some flaws. Some people do not visit many sites, or only have one email address. However, for those of us who have much that we check, or for people who follow multiple RSS feeds, Protopage is a wonderful site to use.
Filed under: Web
