LiveVideo Acquires Pageflakes

TechCrunch has reported that Live Universe has acquired Pageflakes and plans to integrate it into LiveVideo. In fact you can already get some sense of how the integration will look by visiting the beta site at http://livevideo.pageflakes.com/

This is a very interesting merger because both of these sites use ASP.NET technology. It will introduce the vlogging community to mash ups using RSS feeds and widgets. I hope LiveVideo intends to permit custom pageflakes because I would love to create some pageflakes for the vlogging community.

I've been using the LiveVideo web site for a long time because it is the second most popular vlogging site and they clearly understand vlogging's potential for social networking. In fact, I've usually included LiveVideo Featured Videos in my web parts experiments and JSON mash ups. I am well prepared to take advantage of this new social networking application platform.

Live Universe seems to be very aggressive in their attempts to dominate the social networking market. They have already expanded LiveVideo to include text blogging and social broadcasting. Most other social networking sites are completely missing the significance of vlogging to form a real sense of community and even YouTube has failed to move into social broadcasting.

I spent most of the day learning how to create a custom pageflake. This was fairly difficult because it is not well documented. I could only find three examples of sample code on the Internet, all from the Pageflakes developer documentation. The developer forum does not show much activity. I had to struggle with some advanced JavaScript (i.e. prototypes and closures). It was quite difficult to use a timer within a function prototype but I managed to create a countdown timer pageflake for a vlogger gathering I plan to attend, the YoTube gathering in Philadelphia on 07/12/2008.

According to Mashable, Live Universe may have also just wanted to acquire some top ASP.NET innovators like Pageflakes co-founder Omar Al-Zabir who blogs on http://weblogs.asp.net/.  Congratulations Omar!

5 Comments

  • Hi Robert,
    Cool flake! If you are interested to publish this on our flake gallery, please submit it from:
    http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Help/SubmitModule.aspx?Module=1

    Thanks for the blog. We are very excited about the acquisition as well. There's immense amount of synergy between us and LiveVIdeo.

    LiveVideo added a "Live Start" tab. Check it out.

  • Thanks Omar,

    I don't think too many Pageflakes users would be interested in that YouTube gathering but vloggers like to meet each other so I think pageflakes like that could be popular on LiveVideo. Event planning and travel deals could eventually become part of the vlogger ecosystem.

    I'll try to create some more pageflakes. I don't think I'll need to use your Content Proxy because any data source can be consumed as JSON if you use Yahoo! Pipes to convert XML feeds into JSONP.

  • nice, really nice!

  • Livevideo acquires pageflakes.. Awful :)

  • Livevideo acquires pageflakes.. Slap-up :)

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