When the Web was still in its infancy, the average home page consisted of some text and a few links, separated by a couple of horizontal borders, and maybe a flashing GIF image of an "Under Construction" sign. Services like GeoCities and Angelfire tried to make it easy for Web newbies to set up a page they liked, and then they were bought by the big portals — Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, as well as Internet service providers like @Home and Sympatico — who tried to convince casual Web surfers to lock their home page to their service.
The Web may have changed a lot over the past decade, but the desire for a home or "start" page still exists. And the arrival of newer Web technologies such as Ajax mean that there are a whole lot more things you can do with one now, including reading RSS (really simple syndication) feeds from websites, checking the weather, chatting with friends through an instant messaging client, playing Tetris, looking at some of your friend's photos and even watching video clips.
One of the first start-page services to really make use of all these new Web 2.0 features was Netvibes , launched in September of 2005 by a company based in France. After setting up an account, you can quickly add features or "widgets" to your page, including a widget that checks your Gmail or Hotmail, one that updates the weather automatically, one that rotates through photos from the image-sharing service Flickr based on a particular keyword, and so on. You can add new tabs or pages, and use different widgets on each page, and you can change themes as well.
One way some people use Netvibes is as an RSS reader, by importing all the "feeds" from various websites or blogs they like and then sorting them into different tabs based on subject matter. Users can choose how many headlines to view in each feed box, can mark them as "read" with a single click, and can move each feed box (or any other widget) anywhere on the page by simply clicking and dragging it to a new position. Feeds update automatically at regular intervals.
You can add some other tools to your Netvibes pages too, such as Meebo — a Web-based instant messaging tool that connects to all the major chat services — and Box.net , an on-line file-storage service. Netvibes has a Notepad widget too, for scribbling reminders to yourself. And there's a Netvibes "ecosystem" as well, where users share their favourite widgets or feeds and you can see how many people subscribe to each.
Another player in the start page market is Pageflakes (based in Germany), which just launched an upgrade to its service that makes it fairly competitive with Netvibes. It also offers tabs, and many of the same widgets, as well as the ability to change the theme or colours of your page. And the pages you set up on Pageflakes can be shared with anyone, or only with a small group of people — so you can easily add your contact info, photos and so on and then share them only with friends and family members.
Not surprisingly, the Web portal giants have jumped into the start-page game as well. Microsoft recently launched its Live.com service, which looks and feels very much like Netvibes, and Google has a customized home page as well that allows users to add feeds and widgets. Since most of the start-page services allow outside developers to create widgets, the number of add-ons continues to increase. At the moment, Google appears to have the largest number with about 1,200 or so, but Microsoft is also adding more every day.
In addition to the big guys, there are other smaller startups as well, including ProtoPages (based in London), Eskobo and WebWag . Unfortunately for some of the smaller players, it's likely that Microsoft and Google will wind up taking a lot of market share simply by appealing to their existing user base.
