Check out my mini !

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Im an investor in a company called Goowy Media. Its based in San Diego and is run by a bunch of smart guys who decided they were tired of everything on the net being built around HTML. So they decided to take Flash and turn it into a desktop environment. Their first product was Goowy.com . This past week they made a huge step forward when they introduced Yourminis.com .

Yourminis can be a lot of different things. A personal desktop. A Personal Homepage and more. But where Yourminis really shines is the ability to publish a personal page. Check out what I did to create a public personal homepage. It allows me to share (or not) things that Im doing that might be of interest to others. Kind of like myspace or facebook, but geared more towards sharing information rather than Which Victoria Secret Model Im most like. On my yourminis page I have some of the stocks I track. The searches and blogs I track. Some personal pictures. A video of the day from some of the fun things that people send me.

What makes Yourminis publishing work really well for me is that it comes with a long and expanding list of widgets that make adding pictures, videos, searches, whatever to the page super easy. Plus it now has Firefox and IE7 extensions, which lets me capture a search I do or anything with an RSS or Calender or just about any microformat I encounter and quickly and easily add it to my page.

The site has only been up a week, so there is lots of upside for the project. Check out Yourminis.com, set up your own page, let us know what you think. And of course, check out my page and add some feedback

48 thoughts on “Check out my mini !”

  1. I recently added a Boston Red Sox Mini tab featuring content from my blog at http://www.redsoxtimes.com.

    The yourmini can be found at http://www.yourminis.com/redsox

    Comment by Tim -

  2. Ask yourself the following: What happens if they shut down their service for one hour? A day? A month? A year? Would you (and the people around you) be affected in any significant way? If the answer is “yes” then there is value to their offering. If the answer is “no” then it’s a waste of time (if you’re a user) or time (if you’re an investor) or both (if you invest in your valuable time).

    Comment by Maki Papadopoulos -

  3. it’s fantastic…for people that don’t carry their widgets around in a macbook pro laptop…errrrr, i guess, PC people!

    seriously, i love the idea but it has limited marketability

    Comment by ponky -

  4. Mark
    I am a season ticket holder and purchased every other game.
    Why are games either local or road never shown on HDNET? I have Dish N. and so far this year not one game in H.D. has been broadcast. Do you have any suggestions.

    Comment by Randy Hardcastle -

  5. Hmm sounds like a good idea and all just too bad requires flash player 9… for us Linux users we don’t have that latest version of flash player yet.

    Will check on it in the future when flash player is updated for linux.

    -Mike

    Comment by Mike -

  6. 1st it looks nice. but in my firefox2 the “add this to my minis” does not work.

    Comment by macosbrain -

  7. Mark,

    interesting that you’ve invested in tech that can’t even be indexed right now. Don’t get me wrong I love flash and YourMinis.com is certainly flashy, but given the SEs don’t see flash how will this grow as fast as other opportunities.

    Is there any way to search the network to provide social networking or is this a word of mouth network? I love the pic in your personal background…it’s an open hiway out there, but you may want to see what it looks like in mozilla you have a screen width of about 2000 pixels, so it’s like a whole second page to the right.

    Comment by Mrbshouse -

  8. Thanks for the tip. I like Goowy, and I’d love to be able to use it with my Treo for e-mail. I’m hoping they’ll turn on IMAP access though.

    Comment by Chip Mahaney -

  9. Mark – Thanks for blogging about yourminis.com I checked them out and they have a great product. For users the best part if it is FREE! I liked it so much I have created my own Cancer survivor page

    http://www.yourminis.com/bdowdtcsurvivor

    This page will be used to track my journey as I work towards implementing my 2006 LIVESTRONG Summit Personal Action Plan (PAP), the research and creation of my foundation to support cancer survivors and educate the public.

    Thanks again Mark!

    UNITY IS STRENGTH!
    KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!
    ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING!
    LIVESTRONG!

    Comment by Brian Dowd -

  10. My question is, where the heck do people find the time to manage and build this? It’s cool-looking but not the most easy to navigate…information overload.

    Comment by Marvin -

  11. It’s cool. I see where they are goin with it. It’s nice to see ANYONE really challenge Microsoft. I’m still awaiting the “Google OS”. I know it’s coming.

    http://www.xhaled.com/view_video.php?viewkey=a03099a1c0393373c5b4

    Comment by Michael Bowers -

  12. This is really cool. At a certain point, you think you’ve seen pretty much everything anyone can do with a web page (or making it easy to set up, use, etc.), but then someone comes up with this.

    Comment by basketball drills -

  13. Cool site Mark!

    Remember data race?

    LOL
    cheers
    jay

    Comment by jay -

  14. This is pretty damn cool! Check out my tribute to Tool.
    http://www.yourminis.com/nxssss

    Comment by Jay -

  15. Just checked out your page as well as the minis page.
    VERY SLOW loading pages. So slow it’s not really practicle.
    Have you check out http://www.netvibes.com? It appears to be a bit more mature and loads faster.

    – Bill

    Comment by Bill Ryan -

  16. Hey Mark.

    Excellent Mini. I think it really shows what you are passionate about via a new exciting interface.

    If you’re interested in video on the internet related to Magnolia Pictures, may I suggest the search query, distributor:”Magnolia Pictures”, on your AOL Video mini? I think it returns interesting results.

    For instance, check out my mini at:

    http://www.yourminis.com/jlueck

    to see an example of searching for Magnolia Pictures video clips on AOL Video vs. YouTube. I hear now that YouTube/GooTube may be something you’re passionate about these days.

    -JJ.

    Comment by Jeremy Lueck -

  17. Wow. The idea is great, but the design needs to be more “high End” and polished.

    Comment by George Bakuli -

  18. I think it is the perfect example of what happens when Web 2.0 eats itself. You’ve got that touchy feely personalization thing going on with a client side heavy flash interface that is 90% eye candy up against the concept of a Semantic Web. 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

    Comment by Anand -

  19. there are some basic bugs in it. A number of the “widgets” dont work. disappointing to see they released without some real testing. until the product matures a bit I would recommend sticking with yahoo’s widgets.

    Comment by Mike Verinder -

  20. Brad – we are going to release open APIs to let people develop onto yourminis shortly. In addition we are going to build tools that you can use to combine various elements to custom build your own.

    One cool thing to see is how you can publish your tabs besides as a url, you can publish a tab in heads up mode over your existing blog, or personal page…to see an example go to blog.yourminis.com and click on the “view yourminis” button in the upper right.

    You will see a page that we published load over the blog. To get back to the blog just click into the background.

    Comment by alex -

  21. Mark, One key test for this will be if people start blogging with it. Will blogs start to look like these tabs? Will the blogger be able to add a range of new things to their “tab blog” and have it organized by time? Another key test is extensibility. If I have some widget idea, will I be able to add it to the yourmini widget ecosystem easily? Or does this thing just unite the brands that are already big and established on the web?

    Comment by Brad Hutchings -

  22. Flash is neat and all, but is it accessible to the visually impaired?

    Comment by Ben -

  23. Its interesting to see how many people don’t give an application a chance when they are so caught up about the technology used to develop it. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if its Flash or Ajax – the majority of the world doesn’t care. The experience matters and thats it.

    By the way for the self claimed “Experienced web developer” – here is a bit of news that you should probably be more up to date on.

    Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine

    http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200611/110706Mozilla.html

    ps. You should also send an email to the teams at YouTube (now google), and MySpace letting them know that their decision to go with Flash wont scale in the future.

    Comment by steve jones -

  24. Bad move, Mark. Flash is neither standardized, nor will it be the wave of the future of the way the internet is browsed.

    Considering that one company(MacromediaAdobewhatchamacallit) developed Flash, and that no other developer can quickly develop content with it without spending quite a bit of mullah on the tools, this thing will NEVER take off. Why would I want a desktop with chat, through flash, within a browser, when I already have everything I need to do that in my OS?

    MacOSX and Vista already have killed this concept. Web pages may ‘look’ like this in the future, but it won’t be Flash that brings it to us. It will be a more standardized, easily accessible, not-for-profit framework that will bring it to us. (I’m thinking XHTML/AJAX here… with some not-yet-developed ‘thing’ in the mix)

    But, hey, since you are just throwing money away, mind if I have some?

    Comment by An Experienced Web Developer -

  25. Dashboard widgets (ie Mac OSX and Vista) are missing a few key things that yourminis.com offers.

    1. Portability – you can access yourminis from any computer whereas the dashboard widgets are confined to a single computer.

    2. Interactivity with the web – the yourminis browser plugin, you can get it here – https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3808/
    calls up yourminis in heads up mode over any page you are on and gives you a lot of 1-click options such as add youtube videos, photos from the major photo sites, friends from social networks, rss feeds, mp3s, microformats and more – all to your dashboard.

    3. Publishing – and this is a big one – you cant publish your dashboards using the desktop widgets but you can using yourminis. You can create really cool immersive environments for your friends and family to share and interact with…check out some of these…

    http://www.yourminis.com/coldplay
    http://www.yourminis.com/web2news
    http://www.yourminis.com/gearsofwar
    http://www.yourminis.com/50

    That is very powerful. We are launching a community around sharing and rating tabs sometime next week that will help you discover, rate, comment on and share tabs.

    Comment by alex -

  26. I love the design

    Comment by workflow -

  27. Mac OS X called…..

    said they already thought of this.

    It’s a good idea for PC users who don’t have a dashboard, but Vista will probably have it too. I hope it does well anyway.

    Comment by Kyle -

  28. Am in awe, always loved the versatility of flash. Is it possible to create my own minis with my average knowledge of flash? Any guidelines for developers?

    Comment by Mutwiri -

  29. pretty cool from an AJAX/web2.0 standpoint, but i found the site (and mark’s page) to be very cluttered. of course, i don’t typically surf with a maximized browser window.

    Comment by larryh -

  30. YourMinis and Goowy are separate – I just discovered the very same thing. I didn’t realize that. Thanks Alex.

    Comment by Shan -

  31. Shan,

    Let me see if I can help. Your goowy id and username is different than yourminis id and username. You have to create a new account for yourminis.

    As far as making the page your homepage – you dont have to do anything. If you go to yourminis.com and create your own tabs and dashboard that becomes your homepage.

    Anytime you go back to yourminis it will be set up with whatever you configured. You can also create an account on yourminis (in the upper right it says “sign up”.

    Then you can access your created tabs from any computer by logging in. The publish feature is if you want to share your page publicly with your friends.

    To publish like mark did, you have to create a yourminis account…then set up a tab and then in the dropdown you will see publish tab as the top selection in the tab dropdown…

    If you have any other questions please submit it via our forums at forums.yourminis.com – thanks so much for your support.

    – alex

    Comment by alex -

  32. Right, I see that. The options I have are Change Tab Skin, Align Tabs, Rename Tab, Refresh Feeds. Nothing for publishing or converting to webpage. Another anomaly is that I added the Goowy Firefox extension, but I can’t sign in from there successfully–it gives me invalid username/password, but I can login via Goowy.com.
    Sorry for the trouble, it seems really cool, I just want to be able to use it fully.

    Comment by Shan -

  33. WoW, High Tech myspace. That is very interesting. I like it. Wish I had more time to keep up to date on my website let alone something cool like this. Good Stuff

    Comment by Browie.com -

  34. I like the personalization of the page. It’s not bland.

    The load time is horrible. I don’t even think there is any way to fix that since this is flash intensive.

    Comment by Aman Makkar -

  35. yourminis is awesome, im definetly gettin one for myself! your site is great man, you’re always smiling! it makes me feel better about my future knowing that even as an adult life can be a blast.

    Comment by Troy Turner -

  36. Looks like you know how to pick’em, Mr. Maverick. YourMinis looks like a killer app.

    Now, could you please buy the Kansas City Royals from David Glass, please?

    Comment by CultivateGreatness -

  37. Looks like an amazing product. I’ve been a long time Netvibes user and after spending on hour with http://www.yourminis.com, I’m ready to switch – you just can’t have the multi-media interactivity in the Netvibes world that you get with yourminis.

    And by the way, I exported my OPML file (which is large) from Netvibes into Goowy. It takes me over 30 seconds to log into Netvibes and under 5 to get into Goowy, so for those saying Flash is slowing things down, I’m definitely confused.

    Mark – thanks for turning us onto this – I think you have another winner on your hands.

    Comment by Bill H -

  38. Wow, yourminis is amazing! I think I have a new homepage. To all the people discrediting the power of flash, let me be the first to say that it is the future of integrated media. Why do you think Youtube, Myspace, and Google use flash to stream video? Why do you think Flickr, Photobucket, and virtually every photo sharing site uses Flash for slideshows? TV shows are starting to be streamed through Flash also… soon Mavs games too, I’m sure. There is no better dynamic media platform, period. Good job guys over at yourminis, I will enjoy watching you prove the flash nay-sayers wrong 🙂

    Comment by Jonathan -

  39. Matthew – I just went to both http://www.yourminis.com and pageflakes and yourminis loaded much faster…

    I think people need to get off the AJAX vs Flash bandwagon and focus on the experience. Who cares what technology it is if they are getting the experience they want.

    ps. Have you ever been to Myspace – I guarantee before it because big people would have said what a mess it was. Same with this product – I can see making clean and simple pages, or pages that have a lot more personality – in either case the beauty / value is in the eye of the beholder.

    Comment by mikha -

  40. I didn’t load right away for me. I had to refresh 3 times to see any of you stuff. I looks like a cool page though. I think I’ll make one :O)

    Comment by Sports Bettor -

  41. I don’t get it. I do the same thing with my google homepage. maybe you coudl help me understand how the two are differant?

    Comment by Derek McCOy -

  42. I hope you don’t mind me being frank, but you’ve wasted your money. Flash is a fun tool, but it’s too slow. Just looking at your page as an example, it took 15 seconds for each of the items on your page to slowing come up. I waited for another 5 seconds unsure if it was fully loaded or not.

    There are similar pages out there that work in Ajax, that are just far superior. Protopage is one example. No loading time at all. Ajax is the wave of the future, not flash (which has been around for ever and not gained much ground on the market).

    Comment by Matthew -

  43. I like it, just made it my home page. It will be a lot easier for me to keep on task with some of the features. Thanks Mark.

    Here are my published pages.

    http://www.yourminis.com/smc1
    http://www.yourminis.com/smc2
    http://www.yourminis.com/smc3
    http://www.yourminis.com/smc4

    Comment by Shane -

  44. Looks intriguing enough. I’ll have to play around with it for a while. I think it’s a great idea…

    Comment by AJL -

  45. Yawn. Looks like the Dashboard in Apple OS X and I prefer the widgets offered there. Sorry Mark.

    Comment by Dave Kaiser -

  46. Thanks for the tip Mark. Will go check it out now. Do you have a stake in yourminis.com? Just wondering.

    Comment by Antonio Howell -

  47. Checked out your page – YM is certainly something that is a little different – I’ll play around with it after my exams!

    BTW, I find that the video on the top right is a little distracting – the user should have a choice to play the video.

    Comment by Marco - Trading Critic -

  48. This looks great…Ive been playing with it all week….check out some of the other published tabs I found in their forums.

    http://www.yourminis.com/coldplay
    http://www.yourminis.com/50
    http://www.yourminis.com/web2news
    http://www.yourminis.com/gearsofwar

    Comment by John -

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