About Linkamatic

For about twenty years, the first thing I did every morning was open my.yahoo.com. The weather for my city, the headlines I actually cared about, a couple of stock tickers, last night's scores, my mail, all stacked on one page I had arranged myself. It loaded the second my browser did. It was the most useful screen on the internet, and hardly anyone talks about how good it was.

Yahoo let it wither, redesign after redesign, until it wasn't the thing I had relied on anymore. So I went looking for a replacement, and spent longer at it than I'd like to admit.

Years of trying everything else

iGoogle was the obvious heir, and Google shut that down too, in 2013. After that came the tour of survivors: Netvibes, Start.me, Protopage, igHome, Symbaloo, and a long line of browser new-tab extensions. Each one got a piece of it right and missed the rest. Some were rigid grids you couldn't really shape. Some buried the page under their own ads and "recommended for you" clutter, the exact thing I'd quit social feeds to get away from. Some were plainly abandoned, last touched years ago. A few were genuinely nice, then asked for a monthly fee to do the basic thing. None of them felt like mine the way the old page had.

So I built the one I wanted

Linkamatic is that page. You drag your links and a set of live widgets (a clock, weather, a calendar, a focus timer, notes, an RSS reader, a watchlist, and more) onto a grid, arrange them the way your head works, theme it until it looks like yours, and set it as your browser's home and new-tab page. It opens every time you start the browser, the way my.yahoo used to. Keep it private, share a page at its own link, or invite someone to build one with you.

It's run by Taskamatic, LLC, which is a one-person shop. No investors, nobody to answer to except the people who use it, which is why there's no upsell in your face and no feed quietly deciding what you see. It earns its keep by being good enough that you set it as your home page and forget the alternatives existed. That's exactly what happened to me.

Say hello

If you used my.yahoo or iGoogle and have missed them ever since, this was built for you. If something's broken or missing, tell me, there's a real person reading. Drop a note through the contact page, or read more about how the pieces work on the blog.