Review: Is Google Still The Ajax King?

The Winners: Pageflakes and YouOS
I went back and forth trying to decide between Pageflakes and YouOS, and in the end, decided that they both rate as winners in this category.

That is, if this category can be said to have any winners. Ajax-based webtops basically act as Web-based backdrops for a bunch of applets such as RSS feed readers, chat engines, blogs, photo organizers, and so on. They are a lot of fun to play with, but whether they are actually useful is still in question.

Pageflakes: If I were going to use an Ajax desktop, Pageflakes is the one I'd pick. To begin with, Pageflakes has the most interesting and useful types of applets (which it calls Flakes), and the widest variety: Besides offering a very easy way to link to various popular RSS feeds, the service lets you add the Funny Quote of the Day and TV listings; use a movie finder that hooks into IMDB.com; chat live using the Pageflakes chat engine (which is actually not very useful, since you can only chat to other Pageflakes users); write notes; check the weather; keep to-do and contact lists... There's even a link to a simple Alexa graph that lets you monitor the traffic of up to five Web sites. As of this writing, there were 98 different Flakes that you could choose from.