Fold Looks Promising

Fold is a Web 2.0 start page that looks promising. The site aims to "consolidate most of the tools and information you need every day into a single web page." Hopefully this is more than just another RSS start page. I would love to see what Jeff Jarvis once called "a place for all my stuff." With everything increasingly RSS enabled, we're getting there. Has anyone tried Fold yet? It looks similar to Goowy.

Comments

[Axel Wolf]

Steve,

thanks for mentioning Fold. More screenshots are on Flickr. Public beta is due Monday, Mar. 13.

Cheers, Axel Wolf

[Rantage]

"At the moment only Firefox or compatible browsers are supported by Fold."

From a development point of view, I can sympathize. But launching a web application that doesn't support Internet Explorer -- which has the lion's share of the browser market -- just strikes me as...shortsighted?

That aside, it looks great and I'll be checking it out come Monday.

[Gerard McGarry]

I disagree Steve. No offense to Mr Wolf, but it looks a little too much like Goowy, which I used for a little while before reverting straight back to NetVibes.

Ideally, what I'm looking for is the functionality of NetVibes with a better design, possibly like BozPages.

[Axel Wolf]

Gerard, Fold may look like Goowy at first glance but it's in fact completely different. For example, as I understand it with Goowy you can only have one instance of every mini.

Let's assume you are a weather junkie who wants to monitor weather conditions for 20 different places. Only one weather mini in Goowy, but with Fold you simply open up 20 weather containers, set the location for each and, presto, 20 auto-updating weather monitors.

Same with Flickr: One mini in Goowy, unlimited containers in Fold.

With regard to functionality Fold is actually closer to Netvibes where you can also have multiple content elements of the same kind. What I don't like about Netvibes (and Pageflakes, Live, Zoozio which are all alike in this regard) and what prompted the development of Fold in the first place is the rather rigid 3-columns layout of those sites. If you are on a large monitor you end up with 600 pixel wide columns which is an enormous waste of screen estate. Obviously, only time will tell what concept prevails but feedback from the private beta indicates that people love overlapping windows.

There is one more thing in Fold that could very well be the make-or-break issue. It's the support for Flash content. There are hundreds of thousands of Flash applications out there: Calculators, clocks, games, animations - you name it. Simply open a Flash container (again you can have as many of those as you wish), enter the url to an SWF file and hit "Update". In addition, the proxy architecture of the Fold server backend lets Fold-specific Flash applications ("Foldlets") access content on the web.

Cheers, Axel

[Axel Wolf]

The public beta is now online:

Fold Beta

Have fun!

[mr wolf]

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[Matt Williams]

Am I missing something? It seems to be a website about barcodes...

[Matt Williams]

Am I missing something? It seems to be a website about barcodes...