On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 2:10 AM, Martin Sourada <martin.sourada@gmail.com> wrote:
But lets look at the current one first. What's in:
1. search -- superfluous, current web browsers have search integrated
   in their UIs and in my experience people use it
True. Furthermore having a Google powered search as a fedora branded page doesn't really fit with the project values, because Google is not open source.
2. fedora planet posts -- that's what default configs of rss readers
   should include, why duplicating it in a web browser?
Excellent point. Plus, we have the planet in the default bookmark set
3. announcements -- well this one's hard, the mailing list probably
   does not have a rss feed, or does it?
Actually, every mailing list has an RSS feed, that's  how we get the announcements on start.fpo :)
4. a bunch of links -- can be better managed with initial speed dial
   config
Or better set of default bookmarks.

Furthermore, since major players in the browser feed are already using
speed dial (chrome by default, firefox for new tabs), people are most
likely used to that.  
 
There's only one thing that bugs me a little. One of the biggest sources
of traffic on my blog is from start.fedorapeople.org (even more than
from the planet itself) so what we are discussing *might* not reflect
the real state of things, actually... Are there any statistically
significant data (I realize one low-traffic blog is not statistically
significant) regarding the real-world usage of start.fp.o?
I don't know if we have any statistics, I never bothered to find out. if someone has them,  it's probably the infrastructure team.

Cheers,
Martin

--
desktop mailing list
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop


My suggestion after reading this long discussion:
We should have a first-run page which Firefox will show after you install Fedora.
After that, it should show the default upstream start page.

For other browsers and/or people who prefer to use it, we will keep start.fpo (maybe redesign it to look better) and anyway have start.fpo as part of the set of default bookmarks.

Sounds reasonable?
--
-Elad Alfassa.