I swear I read something about a module writing competition on the homepage, but I removed the module and now I can’t find anything. If you’d care to post the link about the competition, Ole, feel free. I found this text on the developer site:

By the way, you can win an XBox 360! The developer of the most popular flake will get a FREE, brand new XBox 360! If you submit a flake before March 31, 2006 you will automatically enter the sweepstakes.

Looks like you’ve all missed the March 31 deadline, but you could still be the most popular!

Yes, Google has many more offerings when it comes to modules, but there is good reason; they are nearly a year old. (Just under 6 months if you count the official release since it left Google Labs in November, 2005…so they have about 6 months on you, plus the advantage of being the top search engine thus a much wider audience).

I’m sure that in time (and with your competition taking place) Pageflakes will catch up AND catch on. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the progress and the moment the Gmail module is improved I just may give it another shot. What you do have on Google’s Gmail module is the fact that you can click on the subject within the module and see a snippet of the body of the message. I just don’t want my module to fill the length of the screen with all the messages I chose not to archive yet.
The module I added yesterday to my Personalized Google homepage was the Earthquake Watch which is a third party, non-Google-sponsored module written by David Crowell. With this kind of support from a site that is dedicated to “Unofficial” Google Modules, the choices are huge; at last count 479 modules which don’t include Google’s Official offering. Granted, a lot of them are pure crap, but at least I have some choices.

I’m looking forward to see what you do with Pageflakes. I hope you have a lot of success because I think your site is certainly on the right track. For the record, another module that I’d like to see that I use on Google is another third party module called Google Webcam Module. I work in the basement (don’t all IT people?) and rarely get a glimpse outside. I’ve configured this module to refresh a picture from a local webcam that looks out over the valley to refresh when I load my homepage. It’s my office window.

I hope this didn’t turn into an ad for Personalized Google, but you asked. Let’s see what your people can do. As for me, I just dabble and I’m in the process of learning Ajax. We’ll see if maybe down the road I can’t come up with something good. In the meantime, I hope you have much success with the competition!!!

Tyler

Cheers
Ole, Pageflakes