Personalized web home pages should provide you with a secure, useful, stable and reliable portal or dashboard. They should remove the need to type the same URL address each day and the risk of an address typo - especially as we now see top-level URL changes coming where .con could become as comon as .com and .edi be a .edu typing error.
NetVibes from France is one of many current providers of what should be a personal web page.
It is not.
A personal web page builder would allow you to choose email provider links, such as a link to www.gmail.com – but instead NetVibes offers a widget to hold your Google Mail ID and password. No thanks. My browser no longer is doing that, why would I have your widget store the same private content on your server?
A corporation using a home page builder would likely not want personal GMAIL in the mix at all - let alone passwords stored on a NetVibes server. But apparently they are doing so.
Another service recently asked me to turn on Java in the browser on my net book. No thanks.
One answer lies in a secure client-side web technology – such as is offered by www.curl.com – and using a framework in which the "builder" provider does not know where the user stores either that page template or widget field contents such as Google Mail ID and password. The challenge is to make the portal available to the user across multiple devices - and to restrict it to the company domain and the company-issued mobile device went that is corporate policy.
That challenge can be met at the expense of a few more steps in setup and the use of a user-selected trusted third-party who is at arms-length from the "builder" service. The latter need not know which trusted repository was selected.
Curl on the desktop is quite adequate to the challenge - but Curl 7.0 does not yet have a mobile solution.
This is not to minimize the challenge - as can be seen by the case of HushMail in Canada and their use of Java in the browser.
