That first place you go is the most important place.  When you open your browser, your home page opens.  Sadly, many people still do not know how to change their home page and it opens to (curses!) AOL.  For those of us who matured, and chose another home page, it once was a competitive battle to own our home page.  Yahoo and Google understood this early on in the game with MyYahoo and iGoogle pages, customizable pages allowing you to choose what appeared on your page.

Sure, these pages were convenient, but it wasn’t enough.  It then became a question of where you went next from your home page.  That second location: your email, MySpace, Facebook.  That place you went once you read over your page.  The reality is no one opens their browser for their MyYahoo or IGoogle pages.  It’s the second location that was key.  The home page is like a doormat to something else, a precursor.

The second place: our email, our Facebook page, a place to catch up with our family and friends and work responsibilities.  If we had twenty minutes to kill, this is where we wanted to go.  Google and Yahoo and others have realized this trend, and once there, they want to keep our attention for longer than ten minutes.

Now they wish to make everything possible in this one place–a stop-shopping, an all-in-one theme park.  Email is taking this road to the extreme.  You can do so much now in your email that it is becoming less necessary to visit any other sites.

Yahoo is releasing a new Yahoo inbox that adds many of the social networking features and APIs, so you never have to leave that second place.  Once we realize that we can get so much done there, the second place suddenly becomes our first place.

Why set my home page to iGoogle when it should be GMail?  The web is becoming so customizable through various services, APIs, RSS feeds, embed codes, that visiting a particular website is an oddity. Why go to that site when the information can come to me?  Online advertising will soon move from Flash videos on a webpage to ways of injecting the message within the stream.  Check email, Twitter, blog, read the news, all from the confines of your inbox.  Is this the new direction?  And what becomes of websites if traffic stops coming: how will they attract us?  This trend from mashing the best.  What effect will it have on the rest?