OS/2 e-Zine! - MyExcite

MyExcite - by Christopher B. Wright

Summary: Nearly there but not quite, MyExcite has some nice features that copy My Yahoo's, but does not dazzle the visitor.

A few months ago, I was curious enough about all the Portal hoopla to set up a "MyExcite" portal account. After about 10 minutes of clicking around, I got bored and wandered away. Excite's portal has its uses, but it's not the end-all that they're hoping it will be, and quite frankly I doubt it ever will be. Bottom line, MyExcite doesn't live up to its hype, but there are some interesting features and you might want to set one up to visit occasionally.

A MyExcite portal account (.GIF, 13.7K) looks like a web page with a lot of links. No fancy graphics, a few ads that you can pretty much ignore, just a whole lot of links leading to information. Much of the page is taken up with the headlines of news stories -- apparently Excite wants to be your online newspaper in the morning. From my experience, it's just as easy to type "http://www.abcnews.com" and get an entire news site at my fingertips, but people not used to navigating the Internet might like this feature. More amusing is the fact that MyExcite displays your daily horoscope (.GIF, 7K) along with links that allow you to determine your astrological compatibility with your spouse or partner.

Content and Customization

The most useful features on the site, though, are the TV listings (.GIF, 16.6K) at the bottom and the weather report near the top of the page. When you log in, MyExcite records information about your location and displays local information. I live in Richmond, Virginia so the TV listings are for Richmond TV stations and the weather report lists Richmond weather conditions. If MyExcite would focus on more local information than this, I would find the service more useful.

MyExcite tries to give you some ability to customize your site, but that ability is limited and inconsistent. It allows you to modify the color scheme (.GIF, 17.4K) of your site, but it doesn't let you modify everything -- some boxes and text stay the same color no matter what you do, especially an annoying gray box at the top of the page. This is frustrating considering my favorite web colors tend to be black, white, light blue and light green, and three of those colors (guess which ones) don't show up well on a light gray background.

MyExcite divides up the web page into regions and gives you the power to set what information appears in what region. But it doesn't really let you customize the information itself. You can activate or deactivate certain types of information that you're not interested in -- such as sports -- but you can't go one step further and filter out information in categories you don't want. So while I can see the latest breaking news in the computer world, there's no way I can tell MyExcite to only display breaking news about OS/2.

An almost-but-not-quite-cool feature in MyExcite is the ability to link to the articles of your "favorite" columnists. When I first saw this feature, I was intrigued. I envisioned a method whereby you would enter the URL of your favorite columnist (Robert X. Cringely), and MyExcite would link to that URL, giving you one-click access to the rants and ravings of whichever your chosen lunatic is.

Nope. Apparently, everyone has the same "favorite" columnist, which consist of Dave Barry and six or seven other guys I've never heard of. You can choose which ones are your "most favorite", and the others will be excluded, but you can't add any new ones to the list.

A few other interesting notes, though: first of all, MyExcite has a "3d Weather report" that is a Java applet "optimized for the Pentium II". Essentially, you enter the location you want reported on and it will give a 5 day forecast using 3d graphics. It's pretty, and whether it was optimized for the Pentium II or not I was able to run it just fine in my OS/2 browser using my native OS/2 Java support.

Also, MyExcite has a rather complex network of chat rooms, and a rather elaborate Java-based chat program (.GIF, 20.6K) that ran without complication in Netscape/2. For those of you who like the idea of AOL-styled chat rooms, you'll like this feature.

The problem with MyExcite is that it's aimed at the "newbie" -- someone with little or no experience with the World Wide Web -- with the expectation that they will stay newbies for the rest of their lives. This seems unrealistic at best, and regardless it rules out most OS/2 users, who for the most part have some passing familiarity with the World Wide Web. Honestly, if you have the technical skill to type "http://www.os2ezine.com" you probably don't need to use a portal as your home base -- though some of the information on the site can be useful, and you might want to check it once and a while to see what the weather will be, or what's on TV later that evening.

Conclusions

If you're looking for a useful portal-like web site for OS/2 users, we already have a few. The OS/2 Supersite already does most of what MyExcite is trying to do, only with a focus on OS/2 -- it links us to a lot of information about OS/2. Similarly, the Mining Company's OS/2 site is another page that performs that function.

Overall, I'm not impressed with portals, and I'm not impressed with MyExcite. It has its uses, just as any other information site does, but I don't see it as the next big thing. Which means, of course, that it probably will be.

MyExcite

by Excite
MSRP: Free

Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95. He is also a member of Team OS/2.