The Lycos-owned Danish Portal
Jubii has launched
a new toolbar, which lets Web surfers use "scissors" to compose a personal start page. In contrast to normal personalization services, this toolbar lets users combine bits and pieces from any page on the Web -- sort of a
My Yahoo on steroids. Users simply click the scissors in the toolbar, and most pages will decompose into a set of sub-tables, from which users may pick and choose parts for their own start pages. News junkies could combine top stories from a set of major newspapers into one browser window and in this way get all their preferred news -- without the ads. Of course, this tool also may be useful to journalists, who could monitor the pressrooms of a handful of companies in their start pages. Following the Danish trial run, the service is to launch in Germany, France, and Great Britain shortly.
The
Danish Newspaper Association (DDF) has so far issued mixed statements about the toolbar. But this may indeed be a major challenge. While it managed to defeat the deep-linking practice of
Newsbooster, DDF is still facing Newsbooster clones in Switzerland and Singapore, and a
Kazaa-style Newsbooster browser operated from London. This will be a third -– and completely different -- challenge. Is it possible to prohibit a tool that lets users combine several Web pages in one -– simply because this tool can be used to skip ads? It may be that DDF –- despite its perfect track record (3-0 against Intelligy Net, Newsbooster, and Visator) -- has finally found found a worthy opponent in Lycos Europe.
