Why Netvibes/Pageflakes/iGoogle is like Walmart but better

WalMart, the great one stop shop where everyone gets a bargain. If you're not from the USA, WalMart is basically a gigantuan discount shopping colossus where you can buy almost anything at really cheap prices. You may recognise Wal-Mart as Walmex in Mexico, in the UK as ASDA, and in Japan as Seiyu. But why do I say Netvibes/Pageflakes/iGoogle is like Walmart but better? because it is ;-)

If you think of the Internet as analagous to WalMart with all the information in one place at the reach of a click, you can spend a lot of time in there looking, reading, viewing, probing and inquiring. You go in and you usually end up spending more time in there than you planned and leave with more than you bargained for. With personalised pages like Netvibes/Pageflakes/iGoogle, if you imagine these as shopping carts, you simply click, choose your reader and add the feed to your page. You the surfer get to use RSS technologies to create a platform of what information you want to consume. This is much better than Walmart because your cart can grow on your Netvibes/Pageflakes/iGoogle page through the addition of extra pages and you can file all your feeds accordingly.

....and you know what the best best best top top top thing that makes Netvibes/Pageflakes/iGoogle better than WalMart? Customisation. You the customer get to select and choose exactly what you want, when you want it and how you want it...and guess what? your ocean of information is growing every minute and getting smarter every minute as well. Also, Walmart is comparably very limited in that it can only stock so many products due to its physical limitations. The Internet is not limited in space or time. It is a live 24/7 organic mega mega network of WalMarts storing many different products, services, and information at your finger tips across many different time zones. If you know what you want, you will likely find it and you'll find all the complentary products, services, and information around it. The beautiful thing about the Internet is, it will get updated by the minute, hour, daily, weekly or monthly. Your personalised pages is a live platform for all your informational needs and will refine and define itself as each feed updates itself.

As an idea, WalMart could ask or even force it's suppliers to create short online ads for their site which their customers could choose to view and get a more detailed insight into the specs of the product. With food, they could integrate a cooking video, with laptops, a detailed spec on its features, with fitness equipment, an instructional manual on how to lose weight using the apparatus.

I even have many ideas of how to challenge the might of WalMart....or well at least make a little dent in it's bottom line ;-)

Now how much do you think these ideas would be worth?