Well, this was hauntingly familiar. I'd dealt with customized home pages way back in August with Thing 13 (Online Productivity Tools). There seem to be a few more options out there this year, but the principle is the same.
Since Thing 13, I've been using iGoogle as my home page on my home computer. This time, I've been testing Netvibes and Pageflakes out as well. I want to like Netvibes more than I do, but it's been having small problems ever since I signed up. I had to sign up twice because it locked up the first time and my registration never went all the way through. Started simultaneously with Pageflakes, Netvibes takes noticeably longer to load which isn't much of a selling point, and sometimes it just doesn't load at all. And finally, something about the layout just rubs me the wrong way aesthetically. I've changed the template and colors, but it's still not to my taste. The various widgets do what they're supposed to do (mostly), but I find many of them unattractive anyway. I do like that they've got a fairly wide assortment of widgets, but iGoogle has more (so there).
Pageflakes' strong points are the things I didn't like about Netvibes: it loads faster, I like the layout better, and most of the time, with any given flake, I like its look more than Netvibes' corresponding widget. Its mail flakes seem to have more problems accessing my email than Netvibes' do, though. But at least I didn't have to sign up for it twice, and so far it hasn't had hiccups in loading.
I'm not quite ready to dump iGoogle yet. I may not like its layout quite as much as Pageflakes', but I find its basic simplicity appealing in its own right. And the gadgets I've found are mostly doing what I need them to do, although why the birthday reminder gadget occasionally just stops working puzzles me.
Some gadgets, regardless of platform, are just really useful. I like having my various email accounts viewable with a quick glance at one page, rather than traipsing around from login screen to login screen to check them all. I think Facebook and Twitter do just fine as small gadgets: it strips them down to their essentials and cuts out the noise (well, Twitter doesn't seem to have much beyond its essentials, but it still works great as a gadget--if you like it in the first place). And what's a start page without news headlines or brief weather updates?
Like giving Twitter a fair shot, I'll probably continue to try all these home pages for a while and see how they work out in the long run. There are always new gadgets/widgets/flakes to try, after all--may as well see them in three incarnations.
