Roompage is another Web 2.0 startup in Hong Kong. According to them, Roompage is the next generation of homepage application and their goal is to help users integrate their content and presenting them in a personalized way. Roompage was founded by an ex-Googler, Ken Law, along with 2 of his friends.

From first glance, it looked to be a new type of blogging system, but after playing around with it, it feels more like a stripped down news aggregator, like Netvibes but with a touch of decoration. It’s a centralized location where you can add your Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog feeds, notes and music to anywhere on your Roompage. You can dress it up pretty (similar to an clean room) or make a design mess by throwing all the elements together, it’s the users’ choice.

They have also designed a point system for their members and everyone starts with 200 points. Almost everything you want to do, like adding your YouTube videos or blog feeds, you’ll need to spend points and they can go very quickly. However entering notes and individual images/photos or Flickr photos do not require points. Basically, members use the points to make their pages pretty by buying clip arts, music players, video players (to embed your YouTube videos), photo frames, albums, blogs and anything made available by Roompages. Once you use up all your points, you need dig into your bank account, the one that’s linked with Paypal and use real currency in US Dollar to buy more points. It reminds me of Cyworld and their acorns.

The minuses. The majority of the site is done in AJAX, it’s cool and all but for some reason, my computer doesn’t like it very much and it takes time to view other Roompages. The endless number of new window popups is quite annoying as well, but appears to be a design standard in Asia. The system also lacks the ability to add contacts or at least I was unable to locate it and I find the design and usability could use some improvement. They should also look into modifying their point system to be more beneficial to the members.

Lifesterblog is another start up that allows users to integrate some of their established sources, such as, Flickr and YouTube resources into their own Lifesterblog blogs easily.

Roompages is still in the early stages of development and I see room for improvements and we are sure to see more refinements or changes later on. This is a good start and am glad to see more web start ups popping up here.

Update/Correction: I made the mistake of using dot com. It should beRoompage.net. The link is now fixed. Apologies.