A lot of water has flown down the Adobe Creek since big blogs and then many smaller blogs reviewed personalized home pages . Many new promising websites services with better homepages have come up in last one year . It’s time we review whether the newcomers have changed the equations of the game.

The market for personalized homepages is shared between three or four major players and like anything else on web it’s the competition for more eyeballs. It’s the race to be the starting point of web.

iGoogle has the benefit of being a Google service which means it is exceptionally well integrated with other Google services and products. I use gmail and almost all the good services (by good I don’t mean lively or knol) of Google so the iGoogle is without any ounce of doubt the best service if you literally live on Google. The quality and quantity of supported gadgets has increased by multiple times in last one year and it has become more deadly now.

Netvibes are the guys who perfected this concept of personalized home page. The website is pretty well made and the user interface is not bad either. It’s rather though is its very neat layout and the availability of very useful widgets. Google certainly has managed to add more widgets than Netvibes but the quantity of useless add-ons is less here. What is however the trump card of Netvibes is the freedom of customization that it provides to users. The pretty no-fuss look of the site is also one reason to try it out. Netvibes also has a social feature called Netvibes Universe which allows user or even brands to customize their Netvibes page and use it as a public promotion tool.

Pageflakes is another similar service launched almost the same time as Netvibes. Pageflakes has also created a huge repository of flakes ( =widgets) and if we go by the numbers on their website then they have some 236,000 such widgets. Pageflakes has a feature of Pagecasts where you can make your Pageflakes page public for others to see. It certainly has more depth than Netvibes.

Yourminis is perhaps the coolest personalized homepage of all. It has widgets which they call minis and you can bring the desired minis on a virtual desktop. The range of minis is not envious but they surely have some interesting stuff. The best thing I like about Yourminis is that you can drag the minis the way you want and you also get to customize the color and the layout of minis which is slightly better than what Netvibes or Pageflakes provides. The site is based on Flash and that’s the reason why you can play with minis. It has a multiple tab view as well which will certainly help if you have made lot of tabs.

MyYahoo is the result of Yahoo’s attempt at the personalized personalized webpage market. The recent developments in Yahoo have made me skeptical that My Yahoo will be able to catch up. It certainly has access to the largest number of internet users in the world and some smart moves might be able to convince Yahoo users into using MyYahoo. The website is well made, and I personally like its layout much better than that of iGoogle. If you are a Yahoo user then you should try it. The service has everything you will ever use including the custom RSS feed.

Eskobo is no frills personalized home page which doesn’t offer a lot and we could find hardly any reason why people would sign up and want to start their web day with it. If we go by the ratings and traffic of Alexa then it seems that the only country where eskobo has some name is Turkey. It happens to have a turkish version as well and that is one reason of its popularity in that country. I couldn’t see any differentiator in Eskobo and you should only use if you can speak the language of Orhan Pamuk.

Windows Live has a shiny glossy look and it would have been much better had they also invested some brains and time on the functionality. Windows Live in a way redefines what a bad personalized home page looks like. It also illustrates what happens when elephants can’t dance. We would expect a company of Microsoft’s stature to target one segment and somehow leave some mark by bringing in a tremendous game changing technology or service but Microsoft fails miserably here.

Protopage does impress you somewhat because it seems done with the ground required to take on the biggies like Netvibes. It’s feeds feature is more comprehensive and you will see a huge list of news in this one. There are not many gadgets but it has those essentials like email preview, sticky notes, to-do list, calendar and weather. The look of the page doesn’t look very polished and it is not as smooth as its bigger peers were. You can also add bookmarks in Protopage but why would I use it when I have Firefox or delicious.

Inbox looks more like a classified page rather than a proper startup page or a homepage you would love to start you day with. Inbox also provide an email service and it has a search engine as well which I frankly never used. You can’t even customize the page or add tabs in it.

Alot has a very bright neat interface and one thing is sure that you won’t discard it because of its layout and the feel. I personally found it more attractive than iGoogle or even Pageflakes. It doesn’t have too many gadgets right now which leaves a scope of very little customization. It doesn’t even have a RSS feed app which is a very big turn off. A lot is no different than Windows Live in a way that they cared more about looks rather than functionality. Can’t you guys just manage a balance of both looks and features like Netvibes.

Wireseek is also one of those personalized homepages which started to mushroom after the success of Netvibes and Pageflakes. You have those usual features here in Wireseek which you see in almost all similar services. It is however also available in French and German which might just do the Eskobo trick with it. All the essentials are there and the only thing worth telling that I found is that it also lets you add external widgets. The code you get with any widget can be embedded here and it will work. So So.

Favoor somehow reminds me of Fubar but the thing is that Fubar is much better than this Favoor thing. I really hate it when startup services want you to sign up before letting you take any glimpse of the service. I thought it would be a nice service, obviously I got fooled by its Alexa rank. I put in my username and password and signed up ultimately only to find nothing. All you can do is add links, feeds and notes. Is it really something that will make Favoor winner in this league. Certainly not.

Itsmynews welcomes you with a 4-column layout with the fourth column dedicated to Google text ads. You can well imagine what first impression would it leave. It has obviously created a huge list of news items that you can put on your start page but there are hardly any tools or gadgets. Moreover it has a Reddit like user interaction feature too where users can vote stories up or down which on one look clearly implies that nobody uses it.