• PopURLs – Uniquely different than the rest, but still have a lot of information to share.
  
• My Live – The standard lots of boxes, fill me up type of start page.
  
• Protopage – One of the better of the customizable start pages, tons of options and tools.
  
• Pageflakes – Another top choice of mine.  Really like the look and feel of Pageflakes.
  
• Netvibes – Best of the lesser known selections.  Latest update was kinda disappointing however.
  
• Suprglu – Brings your favorite social tools together to create a better start page.
  
• 24eyes – At least they didn’t call it 99 bottles of beer on the wall?
  
• iGoogle – Google’s recently updated way to start your day.  Quickly becoming a fan favorite.
  
• favoor – Notes, news links and more on this lesser known start page.
  
• StartAid -StartAid is perfect for saving all your bookmarks online.
• eskobo – Funny enough, has nothing to do with Eskimos.  Who knew?
  
• smplr – One text box to rule them all!  It doesn’t get any more simplier. (or is that smplr?)
  
• feedly – Start page + Firefox = Starting Goodness?
  
• Widexplorer – Because nobody wanted to use the narrow explorer.
  
• Gizi – A clone of the more traditional tons of boxes start page.
  
• LinkedFeed – The more you use it, the better it serves you!
  
• Fav 2.0 – A thumbnail gallery of your favorite web sites.
  
• Widgetop – A fun and colorful desktop-like start page. 
  
• BBC Beta – Even the BBC is letting you customize their front page.
  
• Webwag – Looks like Netvibes’ ugly and less talented step sister.
  
• My AOL – Get your day going with a fresh cup of AOL!
  
• Sputtr – At least it wasn’t called stu.. stu… studder.
  
• Symbaloo – Wins my most unique award.  Tons of squares to fill in with your favorites.
  
• My Yahoo! – Get your news, weather, RSS feeds and more all with a Yahoo!-like twist.
  

Is it time to change the start page you have been using?  There are many of them out there to choose from.  Secret is, is to find the one that provides the most stuff you need in the best presentation possible.

From celebrities, gaming, news, photos, politics, food and more they have more than just a few topics covered well. They also seem to specialize in just bringing the best resources on a lot of different topics together in one spot.

Where a place like popurls gives you general geeky web goodness with a lot of page customization tweaks, Alltop focuses on delivering you as much relative content as they can and do so in a stylish way.

There are tons of positives.  The overall loading seems to be faster than the previous version.  Also adding content to the page is a lot easier thanks to the new top dashboard-like area:

The public "Universe" is cool too – as now I can push out my own customized page on Netvibes for the public to see.  To check out the one I created while testing, go to:

http://www.netvibes.com/cheasym

Here is another shot of host Netvibes looks with a little personalization and flair added to it.  This shot is very colorful but in all honesty you can customize almost every aspect of how it looks and they even have 2 new themes to use too.

I could only find one negative.  The new social aspects of it, that is the only area where I am not so sure about yet.  Maybe because I don’t have any friends using it yet (might be better to test it with a few good buddies).  Not sure if I want to manage yet another collection of friends.

Final thoughts on Netvibes Ginger is that it is a winner and another nice reason to use Netvibes as one of your start page solutions.  They are really trying to move beyond being just a start page though and are evolving into a place where they hope you will hang your had and stay a while. 

Yep, that is it. No boxes, no RSS and nothing else to distract you. How do you use it? Type in certain keywords or phrases and it does the work for you. Here are all the commands you can use:

These are the triggers that smplr currently supports. Type one, followed by a query. go:(open a supplied url), y:(yahoo), news:(google news), w:(weather, zip code only), wiki:(wikipedia), film:(imdb), tv:(epguide), mmm:(recipes), wow:(thottbot), ebay:(ebay), game:(mobygames), bt:(thepiratebay), buy:(pricegrabber), stock:(yahoo finance), blog:(technorati), snopes:(urban legends)

They also have several themes you can pick from too – changing the background picture. All in all smplr is one unique way to start your browsing experience that can at least say it is copying nobody else out there in the start page world.

How important is user feedback and experiences (good and bad) when it comes to the Pageflakes product?

Dan: It’s extremely important and we have ongoing dialogues with our users through the blog and support forum. We monitor this full time and read & respond to every email. Our product plans include user requested information by way of reviews and feedback. We always have a representative from customer services support team involved in our product sessions.

This is to not only know how our site is produced & written, understanding sessions etc but also to represent the user base and their comments/suggestions into our future plans. They aggregate the most popular requests and common denominator feedback so we acknowledge this as paramount in our product plans. Ongoing dialogue internally and with our users are taken extremely seriously into our product design development strategies.

Start pages have a history of being something that people spend five minutes on, get caught up on whatever they want to watch – clocks or kitten saying funny things. Why should somebody invest the time to spend more time with Pageflakes?

Dan: A great number of users spend more time on Pageflakes than email and social networking sites. The old generation of personalize pages i.e. my Yahoo would result in people clicking for a moment and then visiting another site. But the old RSS information was sports, news and stocks related so if the user wanted to read more, they’d click through or venture to other websites.

With Pageflakes, users can check bank balances, email, network, visit social networking flakes so the interactive elements on Pageflakes is richer and includes flakes that users couldn’t do before. We are revolutionizing what people are doing on the Web. Technology has changed and Pageflakes is more of an engaging experience by definition to keep users on the page longer. They are learning and digging deeper into topics individually and interacting with other like minded individuals.

Focusing your attention to several new projects to aim your pages at a lot of niche audiences (like what you plan to do with education) do you hope to move the project along further than that 5 minute or less eyeball viewing time most start pages get?

Dan: Reiterating the above again, people are using Pageflakes longer than 5 minutes. This is their environment and not just a website. Pageflakes has been active within the educational community globally for 15 months so what we are doing is not just attracting a niche audience, but letting the users create an entire community of say, teachers. They use Pageflakes in the classroom, share through private collaborations and have students visit the pagecasts regularly for assignment updates.

It’s a group product service. We support them and thrive on this grown in the new education paradigm. Pageflakes has been involved with thousands of schools in the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and more. Earlier this year, Pageflakes won a Gartner Award in the Enterprise Category.

This is a reflection on companies who also use Pageflakes as their new internal portal for projects, management, tracking industry research etc. Small businesses use Pageflakes to promote themselves i.e. SoulSistah100 who’s music is basically her business. Companies now use their Pageflakes home page on their business card as a primary example of the work they’ve produced.

From your history at both Yahoo and Google, you have obviously seen what works and what does not work. How have your past experiences helped shape the way you’d like to brand and mold Pageflakes going into the future?

Dan: Past experiences have shown what users want and don’t want in personalized start pages. I now have the opportunity to focus exclusively on delivering the best home page and experience to our users. In terms of shaping and branding, we have simply given the users an incredible set of tools to build their homepage and share with others in a simple and easy format. Our user shave really shaped Pageflakes future for education, business and social networking. We gave them the tools to make their own themes, logos, photos and their own branding experiences.

In the past, products working well were part of an overall company strategy with various different priorities alternating and interlinking. With Pageflakes we get to focus on one thing and excel in this as a true mass market innovator and user driven product initiative that our users can enjoy, personally and professionally.

What are some of Dan’s favorite flakes and pagecasts?

Dan: My pagecast is http://www.pageflakes.com/dancohen and obviously this is my favorite pagecast. I’m also interested in our user’s pagecasts such as SoulSistah100 and nancypants. These users take Pagecasting to new heights, for personal use and business.

I like to see what all users are producing and it’s fascinating to live and visit their lives i.e. what it’s like to be a housewife in Calgary with 4 children, an educator in Scotland or a singer in Osaka, Japan. It’s fun to experience their personas and a bonus for other Pageflakes users to explore.

I also like viewing our new series of open Pageflakes Pagecasts that we’ve produced incorporating flakes from our community section, seasonally and ongoing such as Christmas, UK New Years and our exciting new Super Bowl 2008 pagecast. These are an ongoing campaign that are not only fun but extremely useful for information gathering, copying flakes and you don’t need to be a Pageflakes user to visit these.

I regularly check my universal video search (listed on my pagecast) along with updates on music with a weekly podcast. And local events for my family and I to enjoy this one.

I want to thank Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes for giving me a few free minutes of his busy day to ask questions people actually want to know the answers to.

So now I am looking at some of the competition and I have to say only one has impressed me thus far.

Netvibes is becoming king of the start pages, if you like customization, speed and cool tools to use. Now I don’t need a lot to get going – but it is nice to see they have tons of tools to add.

What does Netvibes Have that iGoogle Does Not?

• More Customization Options for the Web Page
• Quicker Loading Times Overall

Only reason I can see for using iGoogle is to use their specialty gadgets for Gmail and Google Reader. So am I making the right choice? Is there one that even blows Netvibes out of the water?

Get the Basic Gadgets Out of the Way First

Your first tab should have all of the gadgets on it that you actually get some use out of. I like the weather one along with the Google Reader one the most. You might also put other application based gadgets here so that you can get good use out of them.

Here are a few good “basic” gadgets to get you started:

• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Weather Forecast
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Easy Way to Gather Gadgets Based on Topic

Now every tab after that should be based around things the interest you. You can create them very simply by naming the new tab after your interest. For me I would type in “Web Hosting” and then make sure the check mark for “I’m feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name” is selected.

From the suggestions they give you – you can cut out the ones you really don’t like and add a few it might have forgotten.

Should You Create a Popular Tab?

Now there are a lot of social link popularity Web sites out there as well. Digg, Reddit, Delicious and a boat load of others. You might try to gather all the ones you can and put them on their own tab. This way you can see what is the most popular set of links at any given moment.

Need suggestions on which ones you should be tracking? Visit popurls for a long list of these sort of Web sites. Visit each one, grab the RSS link and take it to you own iGoogle start page.

Is That It? Do You Have More to Share?

There you have it. That might have taken a whole five minutes to configure! Now you have a need focused start page that will help you keep up to date with what you need to stay informed with. If you know of any other iGoogle optimization tips feel free to drop in a comment and let me know.