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?

Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that originally launched in Germany in late 2005, has been acquired by Los Angeles based Live Universe, sources tell us. The deal has not yet been announced, and both Live Universe and Pageflakes refuse to comment.

Pageflakes raised a high profile round of funding in May 2006 from Benchmark Europe (renamed Balderton Capital). Balderton has continued to bridge the company with additional funds, and about $4 million has been invested to date.

Live Universe, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, has made a number of acquisitions to spur growth. Most recently, they acquired video site Revver, in February 2008. The also run the video site LiveVideo.com.

The deal was competitive, according to one source, who says that Colorado-based NewsGator was also bidding. But it’s likely that the acquisition price was not huge – Pageflakes is in a highly competitive market dominated by Yahoo and Google. Even so, reports that the company may be going to the deadpool seem to be inaccurate.

Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, who ran the My Yahoo product prior to joining Pageflakes, will report to Greenspan, and the company will remain at their current offices in Germany and San Francisco.

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.

The global hip-hop community: twenty four million people between the ages of 19-34, from a range of nationalities, ethnic groups and religions. Their collective spending power is $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Naturally, there are lots of online properties dedicated to Hip Hop culture. And now they have a customizable Ajax home page, too.

New York based global Grind launches this morning with some serious backing, a venture round (size undisclosed) from Accel Partners and Russell Simmons.

The service is essentially the same as Pageflakes, Netvibes and other customizable Ajax home pages.

Users set initial interests (video, comedy, news, etc.) and get a set of pre-made modules. You can also add feed URLs directly, create multiple tabs, etc. All standard stuff, even if Global Grind has slightly edgier design than the others.

A lot of the pre-made content is directly related to Hip Hop, though, such as one that shows the most recent beefs between rap artists (just like blogger wars apparently, plus money, sex and guns – see image to right). Users can also make tabs public and share content.

The company was founded by Navarrow Wright, formerly the CTO of Black Entertainment Television. The company has twelve employees.

So…will it work or will it drown in the competition? Frankly, I’m in favor of any experiments which bring technology to people beyond the early adopter tech geek crowd. The Global Grind user base is already tech savvy, though, and aware of a lot of the new web products out there. That means they have to be cool and edgy enough to attract and keep users who wouldn’t think of using, say, Netvibes. Having Russel Simmons involved will certainly help in that area. We’ll check back in on them in six months or so and see how things are going.

Mesa Dynamics has announced the alpha preview release of Amnesty Hypercube, a desktop platform for web widgets.

Amnesty Hypercube allows users to use web widgets, such as those provided by Google Gadgets, Pageflakes, Widgetbox and others on their desktop in a similar fashion to Apple’s Dashboard, Yahoo Widgets, Google Desktop and the Vista Sidebar.

The theory goes that there are “hundreds of thousands” of publicly available web widgets, flash games, and videos that are designed to run on the web; Amnesty Hypercube brings this choice and variety to the desktop.

Amnesty Hypercube includes a directory of over 150 web widget providers that can be browsed by category and explored from inside the application. Widgets from the directory can be imported automatically into Amnesty Hypercube via its “NoClick” technology.

Desktop widgets tend to be something people either love or hate. If you’re a serious desktop widget connoisseur and are stuck using something like Vista (which is a fairly dismal range of widgets) Amnesty Hypercube could well be for you. As a Mac user I don’t see the need quite as much, however using something like this does expand your widget options.

Amnesty Hypercube is available for both Windows and Mac, and is offered as freeware.

Customized home page startup Pageflakes launched a slew of new features this morning under what it is calling its “Blizzard” release.

Among all of the new features, the two that are important to highlight are social networking and customizable themes on pages.

Until today Pageflakes users could create pages for their own use, and/or make public pages called Pagecasts. The content was and continues to be completely up to the user. Now, however, each user also gets a profile page and can add other Pageflakes users as friends. Effectively, Pageflakes is now a social network, and users can connect based on common interests. See a screen shot of my profile page above (click for larger view). Users with common interests are shown on the bottom right.

Pageflakes is also releasing “themeable” public pages and has partnered with a number of high profile media companies to create their own Pagecasts – USA Today, Rolling Stone, CNN, WashingtonPost, Newsweek Interactive, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, Slate, AOL, Die Welt, Bild and others. This is comparable to Netvibes’ Universe product, although Pageflakes is live and anyone can create a themed public page (Netvibes still requires a partnership, you can’t just create one yet). Over 120,000 public pages have been created by users to date – now those pages can have custom themes. The TechCrunch public Pageflakes page is here.

Pageflakes also continues to roll out more widgets – they have 240,000 so far. And new users will like the auto-customization that lets them create a customized page quickly based on a few questions.

See a full profile of the company here, and note previous product releases as well. This continue to be a heavily competitive space, but that competition is driving innovation – from Pageflakes as well as the others. Consumers win.

Personalized desktop startup Pageflakes has long offered collaborative desktop sharing, allowing users to share pages within a private group, edited by multiple people, or published to the world. From Wednesday the service gets a new name specific to group pages: Pagecasts, which the company describes as “the intersection of personalized pages with social media”.

Pagecasts launch with impressive numbers, over 100,000 Pagecasts will be available in the Pageflakes Pagecast directory. The new name cames with an upgrade to Pageflakes’ search functionailty. Stronger indexing tools will provide improved access to publicly available group pages.

Users can use Pagecasts to easily and quickly mashup a multimedia page with interactive Flakes (widgets) that enable them to interact with others.

Real world uses for the service are broad. Existing uses include teachers educating students, families reaching out across the globe, political opinions being voiced, fans expressing their love for their favorite teams and celebrities, small business owners reaching new customers, professionals exchanging ideas, and even children being adopted from Africa.

Scheduled for June, Pageflakes next release will see new customization tools that include advanced theming.

Discloure: Pageflakes is a TechCrunch sponsor

Personalized home page startup Pageflakes is under new management. The Benchmark-funded startup opened an office in Silicon Valley and brought on Dan Cohen, who previously led the teams working on Google IG and then My Yahoo, as CEO.

He’s made some noticeable changes already. Last month they quietly launched a video widget that pulls videos from major video sharing sites based on a keyword. I actually passed on covering it, but have since become hooked on the module and it’s become a sort of personal tv channel on my start page. This morning they will launch a new set of features designed to make creating a new home page as easy as possible.

There are two features think are worth noting in the release – personalization and a number of very cool RSS/widget features.

Personalization

Like the recent My Yahoo release, Pageflakes will focus on customization as soon as you come to the site. Unlike Yahoo, they don’t have a lot of data on your prior web usage, so they will ask you a few questions to start. You pick the things you are interested in – news, sports, tech, gossip, food, games, etc. and tell it your city or zip/postal code. Pageflakes will then build you a personalized start page with pre-populated modules (they call them “flakes”). Weather, local news and local events are set to the user’s location, and can be edited or removed for different content via an Ajax interface.

RSS And Widget Features

Any module on a pageflakes page can be turned into a widget and placed on another site. Above I’ve embedded a widget for the TechCrunch RSS module, but this works for any widget.

By far the most interesting new feature, however, is the “power user” RSS reader. Pageflakes and other Ajax home page sites provide a very good view of RSS information, but only for a few sites. Too many feeds on a page and it gets too cluttered. I use Pageflakes to read a few key feeds multiple times per day, and Google Reader for reading a much longer list of feeds less frequently. With Pageflakes, you now have the best of both. Click “Reader” in the top right corner of any of your pages and you’ll be taken to a RSS reader that looks very much like Bloglines or Google Reader (sometimes called an “Outlook” view because it has two or three panes like Outlook). All feeds from all of your Pageflakes pages are included. It isn’t as feature rich as Google Reader, but it’s close. And it’s fast. Posts can be viewed with or without the original site’s CSS included.

This means Pageflakes is making a play to become THE place users keep all of their RSS feeds, not just the few that are checked constantly.

Other New Features

There are additional features as well, although they will be overshadowed by the RSS reader. Most of these are new modules that can be added to the site, including a nice mashup module of Google Maps and local event data that shows you what’s going on in your location. There are also new modules for stock prices, MySpace profiles, a Hot Or Not viewer, and horoscopes.

Pageflakes is in a very crowded space dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. They have a larger startup competitor in Netvibes as well. But statistics show that once someone starts using a personalized home page they tend to stay there. Since the vast majority of Internet users don’t use any of these products yet, there is still a race to grab users. Whatever happens, it’s good for us consumers – competition is driving innovation. I’d like to see Google combine their IG and Reader products in a similar way, for example. Perhaps we’ll see that soon.

We’ve tracked a bunch of customizable, Ajax-rich home pages over the last couple of years. At one point it seemed like a new one was launching every week.

New ones are still launching (here’s a promising one in beta), and the youngsters, Netvibes and Pageflakes, are showing the most energy and creativity. See, for example, Netvibe’s new effort to create cross platform widgets, and Pageflake’s really cool new video search/notification widget.

Neither of those services, though, have grown large enough to be tracked by Comscore. The big old Internet giants own this space, and will continue to do so in the near future.

That doesn’t mean they are keeping pace with the innovators, though. Netscape relaunched their personalized home page a week ago, and we panned it. Others, with a sense of nostalgia for the Netscape of yesteryear, cried foul. Their line of argument seems to be that since Netscape has been around for a long time it deserves special consideration.

But people vote with their mouse, and Netscape has so little market share that it can’t lose much more and still be ranked by Comscore. Even when combined with the unique users of the My AOL service, they are dead last.

January worldwide Comscore numbers show that the My Yahoo personalized home page has more users, with just over 50 million, than all of its competitors combined.

All Yahoo has to do is remain competitive, and their massive user base will keep them at the top of the pile. Their recent enhancements are a good first step. Now they need to focus on integrating their Konfabulator desktop widget platform into My Yahoo as well – widget compatibility is an area where they are noticeably lagging Microsoft and Google.

FreeYourID is a new web service that allows users to register a personal .Name domain name which in turn can be used as an OpenID identifier, website URL and email host. Your domain name will be in the format of first.last.name and the domain can then be directed to a website, host email aliases or more interestingly, be used as login credentials for services that support OpenID.

For those of you unfamiliar with OpenID it’s an open standards based identity network similar to Microsoft Password that allows you to login to any website that supports the standard using the same credentials. It alleviates the problem of having multiple accounts and multiple identities at different serives and allows you to have a single unique username, password an in-turn profile. To use OpenID, your identity is stored on a trusted identity provider. Instead of logging into a site directly, you log into your identity provider, which upon your verification, shares whatever identity information you choose with the site.

Currently there are a number of steps involved for a user to setup an OpenID identity, but with FreeYourID you can use your own .Name domain and have your OpenID identity setup and served automatically in a simple single-step signup process. With your OpenID enabled .Name domain setup you can then automatically login to any of the growing number of services that support the open identity protocol (for a list see here). This automation is key to helping OpenID reach a wider audience.

In addition, FreeYourID will be rolling out integration with Lycos Europe and Pageflakes. Lycos will be releasing a new product, which will use .name URIs for identity across email, IM, and VOIP. Pageflakes, within a week, will be rolling out personalized .Name addresses for their users to access their accounts. FreeYourID also recently partnered with JanRain to act as their OpenID server.

FreeYourID is giving away free 90 day trial of .Name addresses ($2.99/qtr or $10.95/yr. afterwards).

There’s an odd story developing that involves Pageflakes, a customizable Ajax home page product, and FeedBurner. BoingBoing was first to report this after noticing that their RSS feed count went up substantially from Pageflakes. Over 2 million RSS readers were counted from that service alone. It appears that someone may have set up some sort of bot to create Pageflakes pages with multiple RSS feed modules on each page for a few blogs, including BoingBoing.

But a second source of Boing Boing RSS readers has skyrocketed lately – from a company called Pageflakes. We frankly don’t believe that nearly two million folks have decided to subscribe to Boing Boing via this relatively new service, and we suspect someone (or more specifically, somebot) is taking advantage of the service for some kind of spammy reasons.

The net effect of this would be grossly exaggerated RSS feed counts, which could affect the advertising rates that a blog or other site using RSS feeds could charge. It seems pretty clear BoingBoing has absolutely nothing to do with this, and is working to fix the problem. But other sites are affected, too. Whether one of them is behind this or not is unclear. In an update to the BoingBoing post, a reader said that it may have been nothing more than a bug. That seems unlikely, however, since a bug of this scale would likely have been flagged and fixed.

Either way, this isn’t good publicity for Pageflakes, which struggles behind Netvibes in the customized home page market. And it may be worse news for FeedBurner. If their RSS stats become meaningless, one of the main reasons for using them goes away.

We’ve checked our own Pageflakes stats and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Let us know if you are seeing an issue on your blog or site. You don’t want to be caught in the middle of this if it turns out to be fraud.

Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that is headquartered in Germany, is preparing to launch a major user interface change in the next day or two. I interviewed co-founder and CEO Christoph Janz and head designer Jeremy Baines about the new launch – you can listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch.

A big part of the launch will be promotion of Pageflake’s recently added “publish” feature, where users can create pages with contact information, to-do lists, family pictures, etc. and either publish the content publicly, or share with a few friends. The site is also being completely redesigned (see screen shot below provided by company – sorry for the teaser).

Pageflakes has taken a low profile approach when discussing numbers compared to their primary competitor, Netvibes. While Netvibes (which launched their own redesign a few days ago) has publicized their $15 million venture round as well as user growth (first 1 million and then more recently, 5 million), Pageflakes has not released user numbers or the size of their BenchMark financing.

Regardless of the different marketing approaches of these companies, both are building a large and valuable user base and both have enough funding for the short and medium term. That’s good, because neither have generated any revenue yet. Given the extremely low burn rates of these and other new web startups, they have a while yet to figure out the best way to monetize their audience.

German startup Pageflakes, an Ajax-rich personalized home page (an early profile is here) will announce a Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital on Wednesday. The size of the round will not be disclosed, which suggests it was on the low side.

In late March, Paris-based competitor Netvibes announced a $1 million seed round. Both Netvibes and Pageflakes compete with Microsoft’s Live.com and other personalized start pages. And while they have nowhere near the traffic of Live.com, users routinely comment that they like the speed of the Pageflakes and Netvibes sites in comparision.

Benchmark is actively investing in European headquartered or focused new consumer web startups. They recently led a $15 million round in Bebo, formerly headquartered in the UK (and now in San Francisco).

I recently wrote that the Ajax desktop space was getting crazy-crowded. That was before Google released their desktop widget API and favoor launched. And now we have a developer release of a new ajax desktop called Pageflakes (available only in IE).

Pageflakes has a number of features – rss reading, email checking, note taking, searching, etc. It also has a developer API to allow third party module-creation. Given that Microsoft and Google have this feature, it is a must have to even get in the game.

Pageflakes says it is easier to develop modules for their site than for Microst Live or Google – Developers can use MS Visual Studio and they support ASP.NET and Atlas (modules can also be build using PJP or JSP). Of course, overcoming the user loyalty of Netvibes (now a significant source of TechCrunch daily traffic) and the network power of Microsoft and Google will be very difficult.

My current count of ajax/flash desktops is nine:

• Eskobo
• favoor
• Google
• Goowy (Flash, not Ajax)
• Microsoft Live
• Netvibes
• Pageflakes
• Protopage
• Zoozio

Who am I missing? Who’s lucky number 10? At this point I’m just writing about these for the fun of it.