There's nothing better than trash talking about a competitor (except, maybe, building a better product than them and winning in the long run). Last week Ning's Marc Andreessen shone the spotlight back on the new Ning platform by taking a shot a Cisco's social networking moves (I agreed with him), and today we got a less-than-enthusiastic reaction from former head of MyYahoo, Dan Cohen, to the new MyYahoo service. Cohen, of course, is the new Pageflakes CEO, so no surprises that he'd want to bash the competition. Cohen's comments, from Mashable's mailbox today:
The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today's users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others.
Could it be a coincidence that Pageflakes lets you do all those things? ;)
Some commentators - Steve Rubel, for instance - seem to agree. Personally, I just can't be bothered with the whole Yahoo experience: remember Yahoo ID, reclaim forgotten password, wait for over-designed webpages to load up, figure out how to do complicated stuff with a site designed for newbies...Pageflakes, Netvibes, Webwag or even a plain vanilla feedreader (still my preference) offer far more utility.