It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it.

Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

The personalized start page is dead. Long live the personalized start page. Pageflakes, a nice-looking but perennial also-ran in the world of start-page startups, has been officially acquired by Brad Greenspan’s Live Universe, a deal we reported earlier this week. Terms were not disclosed, but it was a combination of cash and stock. Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen will remain in charge of the business and help to integrate it into LiveVideo, as well as continue to maintain it as a separate site.

Despite its easy of use and appealing UI, Pageflakes never really took off. ComScore measured only 50,000 unique U.S. visitors in March, compared to 1.4 million for competitor Netvibes. (And 191,000 uniques worldwide in February, versus 2.4 million for Netvibes). iGoogle had 7.4 million U.S. visitors in March, and My Yahoo had 19 million. But Cohen, who used to run My Yahoo, argues that the difference has more to do with distribution deals than organic growth and that linking up with Live Universe will give Pageflakes the distribution it needs. Says Cohen:

A lot of the growth in the personalized start page category has historically been kickstarted and is still derived from internal and external distribution deals, not organic or viral growth. The original My Yahoo of ten years ago received an incredible amount of traffic from the main Yahoo.com portal (and it still does), and the same went for iGoogle when it launched in 2005 – that little “iGoogle” link in the upper right hand corner of the standard Google.com page was the engine that drove (and continues to drive) traffic to the site.

Comscore shows that even our friends at Netvibes derive most of their current traffic from one deal, the my.alot.com white-label page they did with MIVA, and didn’t experience any growth until that deal occurred last fall. In short, to really thrive in this category, you need big distribution deals with generous revenue share percentages.

I do think that the number of traditional personalized start pages that can co-exist as standalone sites (not affiliated with a distribution network) is pretty small.

In other words, maybe he should have stayed at Yahoo—or Google (where he also worked briefly). The other thing you’ve got to wonder is: What will the half-life of start pages be in a Friendfeed world?

It’s time for an update on the personalized homepage wars – Netvibes and Pageflakes tend to get most of the press attention, and they are certainly pushing the envelope and trying to find new ways to make their services useful to users. But those two services have less than 4% of the market for personalized homepages between them (I have emailed both companies to see if their internal stats match what we have below).

About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space – MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined – 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are.

One thing to note on the data – it does not take into account duplications (where a user visits multiple of these sites, they are counted as users of all of the sites), so the numbers are really only to show relative size).

Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old.

A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a lot of users on their site. It’s going to be a long haul.

Personalized desktop pages have been a popular as various players have grown market share, and others have failed. Providers like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and iGoogle have a passionate user base – nearly 40 million people a month visit My Yahoo alone (Comscore worldwide, January 2008). So many of these popped up by the end of 2005 that we stopped paying attention.

As is often the case though, when an idea becomes popular enough, the barrier to entry often decreases as at first people try to design their own versions, then later you can buy a script that does the same thing. This auction on Sitepoint is offering an “Ajax DeskTop StartPage Enterprise website (like PageFlakes, Netvibes & iGoogle! )” with a starting price of $90. You can test the service youself at Mevou.com.

So what does $90 buy? It’s not as polished as the existing players, but it’s usable. Customizable widgets are offered next to theme and wallpaper support and page customization options. Except for a lack of depth in the widget offering, the experience in using this script wasn’t that much different from similar sites.

I’m not qualified to say that $90 is cheap for the script (it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be found elsewhere for less) but one thing is certain: here comes the personalized desktop page clone army.

Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.

The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).

Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.

PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.

PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.

Netvibes is opening up the beta for its Ginger release, and 500 invites have been reserved for the first TechCrunch readers to sign up here (enter code: “TCGINGER500″). Ginger will become the default interface for all Netvibes members in mid-February, but if you click fast you can get a peak now.

Netvibes is a customizable start page that lets you add any RSS feed, as well as other apps in the form of widgets that you can drag around the page and place anywhere you want. With Ginger, Netvibes has a new Ajax user-interface that pops down a pane from the top whenever you want to add new widgets to your personlaized start page. It also now lets anyone create their own public “Netvibes Universe” page (before, these were just pages for brands). You can star items in any feed as a bookmarking feature, and there is now an activity stream so you can see what your friends are publicly starring and sharing as well. There is still no internal messaging system, however.

I spoke with CEO Tariq Krim, who took me through the new features by phone from Paris. Overall, Ginger makes the Netvibes experience a lot smoother and finding widgets to add to your start page couldn’t be simpler (even though there are 110,000 widgets to choose from). The problem with Netvibes is that if you don’t get into the habit of going there as your start page first thing when you log on in the morning, you are liable to skip it altogether. I asked Krim when he will turn his widgets into Facebook or OpenSocial apps. That way, people could bring the widgets to where they already go to organize the Web for themselves, if that place does not happen to be Netvibes.

Krim is working on this portability. Netvibes is part of OpenSocial and he’s had Bebo-like discussions with Facebook. “Both consortia would like us to be exclusive on their technology,” he sighs. (Sounds like the platform war is in full swing). Krim says he wants to work with both OpenSocial and Facebook. Ultimately,he doesn’t care where you consume his widgets. By the end of the first quarter, he plans on introducing widget ads in the form of micro-banners and text ads. The problem with widget ads, though, is that there are no standards.

“We need the equivalent of OpenSocial for advertising,” he laments. If only everyone could agree on how to make money, the widget economy might actually come into existence.

Update (Michael Arrington): Tariq Krim gave me a brief overview of Ginger this morning, see video below.

This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

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