Strt, A Startpage Project

Anton Purwo Saputro, a graphic designer and web developer, feels that the already existing start pages don't fit with his needs. Therefore, he initiated to create a startpage prototype for himself. The startpage project is named Strt and the demo is available to see in his personal website since April 29.

Startpage is a web page in which there are some useful links or information that appears once you open a browser (Wikipedia). Simply put, Startpage is the first web page you open when you open a browser. From this Startpage, you’ll get the latest updates, for example updates of the latest statuses from your Facebook, latest tweets, new emails or the latest news from RSS feeds. Then you click on the links to start browsing the internet.

Examples of websites that give startpage service are Netvibes, Kolopo, Pageflakes, iGoogle and My Yahoo!. Pageflakes has been shut its services down in January, iGoogle is no longer active, My Yahoo! and Kolopo have minimal customization so they are not very convenient to use. Netvibes is still alive and still growing up. It seems that startpage services have been replaced by a browser start page.

In the demo project of Strt version 0.1, Anton adds the features of HUD Widgets, Shortcut Icon Docks, Instagram Stream, RSS Feed List and some others including Last.fm and StumbleUpon. While looking at feedbacks from others, Anton plans to release the version 0.2 demo on May 5.

It looks like that because aside being a web developer, Anton is also a graphic designer, he was able to neatly put the Startpage’s features that he wanted to show. Of course, it is still in demo version so some features still not functioning properly. And there are still some features that can be added.

In his blog post about this project, Anton is interested to find someone, perhaps an investor or co-worker, to bring this project to a more serious direction to be a business. With Anton’s skills, it seems that making a good Startpage service is not difficult. A more important issue to solve is how to encourage people to want to use the service.