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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?

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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.

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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.

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