Apple Archive

SiteShuffle Turns Your Browser Into a Website Launcher

- 2006.03.10

Over the past few years, one of the popular items that many search engines have been offering up is the idea of a "personal" homepage. Yahoo, MSN, and now even Google offer an option where you can sign in and have the things you want to see displayed on your homepage. This might include the latest news, the weather for your area, stock quotes, or anything else that can be selected from a list of things on the site's preferences page.

Personalization sounds like a great idea, but what seems to happen with these sites is that maybe they'll offer news from CNN, FOX, and ABC, but not from the major network you prefer, and perhaps they won't offer things that you want to see, such as the latest Mac news or automotive news.

Wouldn't it just be simpler if you had a page with links to all of your favorite sites on it and could just go from there each time you open your browser?

Enter SiteShuffle

There is such a site, and it's called SiteShuffle. It was just launched a few days ago, and when I heard about it, I figured I'd sign up and add links to sites that I often go to. [Editor's note: SiteShuffle works with Safari, but it was unusable with Firefox, Camino, and Opera when this article was first posted. SiteShuffle has since addressed that problem.]

The interface consists of a back button and a forward button, along with a red launch button in the middle. Icons for your favorite sites are shown below this, and as you push the forward button, SiteShuffle "shuffles" to the next icon. The name of the site is displayed alongside the icon.

SiteShuffle

If that's the site you want to go to, you click on the red launch button. And if there's a specific site you want to go to, you can click on the site's icon to select it and then click the launch button to open it.

It's really an interesting interface concept, but it doesn't work too well. For instance, Car and Driver magazine and my Earthlink webmail have no icon. SiteShuffle uses its default icon (5 slanted red lines) for both of them, and I can see no way to change it. This is a bit of an annoyance, because I have to click on the icon to see whether it's Car and Driver or my email. Other sites have the same problem - or they have "favicons" that make it easy to forget which site they actually are without clicking on them.

SiteShuffle users also suggest links for you to check out (which makes it like del.ico.us in a way) and, if you want, add to your own LinkList. Some of them you may not like, and you can easily delete the suggestions.

You can also search Google, Amazon.com, and eBay by typing keywords into the box where you add links. This is great, but what if I want to search Yahoo or All the Web? I can't do that unless I actually go to their respective websites.

In general, SiteShuffle's not bad, and I'm willing to cut it some slack since it's a brand new service - and it's free, too.

That being said, the major change I would like to see is the ability to change a website's icon in your LinkList, or, preferably, an improved interface that would allow me to view the name of the site next to the icon at all times so I could know which site I'm selecting.

The current interface is innovative, but I question its functionality.

Another improvement I'd like to see is the ability to add search engines. I would also like to be able to hide the suggested links panel in favor of a cleaner homepage - to make it look more like Google, for example, with just what you need and nothing more.

That said, I'm going to have to get into the habit of actually using SiteShuffle on a regular basis in order to see how it works for me. Since I use three computers on a daily basis, SiteShuffle will simplify my Internet browsing by allowing me not to type in all of those website names (such as webmail.earthlink.net), and just select the site and click on the red launch button.

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