Personalised home pages using Ajax - which to choose?

I have been contacted today and due to my interest in Netvibes, kindly asked if I would write about Pageflakes which is yet another Ajax based personalised homepage.

I currently use Netvibes to access my email, Facebook, Twitter, weather, football and business news, YouTube and eBay - although I am considering ending my Poweseller status with eBay after the recent revelations on negative feedback which I wrote/ranted about recently.

With Pageflakes, you can sign in quickly to the website, add url's ('flakes') to your page ('pagecast'), shuffle them around in priority of importance, create a snazzy background and off you go - similar to Netvibes.

This can act as your new home page and removes the need to rummage through many websites on a daily basis.  You can see all your favorite websites on one page and can create additional pages based on themes i.e. cookery, sports, fashion, celebrities or your own enterprise & business updates.  Upload videos, use the 'anything flake' to add personal messages, calendars and more.

In addition, Pageflakes have now created a series of 'open' Pagecasts for the consumer to use as an ongoing campaign – whether you're a registered user or not.  Some of the themes are below and more are to come throughout the year (Mothers Day, sporting events, national holidays etc). Anyone can see these from clicking the links or signing in and looking in the community section.

· http://www.pageflakes.com/marathon (all related to city marathons including blogs, pictures, videos)

· http://www.pageflakes.com/elections (newsfeeds, YouTube footage, Election countdown, NPR, Huffington Post, Election Polls)

· http://www.pageflakes.com/stpatricksday (photos, video tags, Dublin news, events in Ireland)

· http://www.pageflakes.com/easter (videos, candy & gifts, about Easter, celebration tips)

Michael Arrington was one of the first to comment on Pageflakes way back in 2005 - view his article here.

Pete Cashmore also discussed the two platforms on his blog recently stating: "Netvibes is sometimes said to be the leader, but frankly measuring these things is impossible - not only do they automatically create a page for every visitor (which would inflate the number of “users”), but they also use so much ajax that it would be pointless to count the pageviews. As a result, Pageflakes have decided not to play the stats game for now, and we can’t really compare the services. What does seem likely is that all the top players will see some success."

Personally, I think I am going to stick with using Netvibes as the service is good and pretty speedy. Although I will keep my eye on Pageflakes for any future developments.