With a team confident in its potential and financial capabilities, and with one of its competitors, YourMinis, stepping down from the scene, Protopage seems to be on its paved path to success. In addition, Protopage prides itself in having very low costs and being the only major customized homepage that has not taken external capital. As they say it, they’re cash flow positive, and they want to reassure YourMinis users, as well as all the other users, that they’re safe and that they’re in the business for the long run.

Based on user feedback, the application has been through major changes and updates since it’s been launched. This includes the mobile features launched in 2008. Protopage Mobile has been specifically customized for mobile phones including the Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Windows Mobile 5/6, HTC and Palm. For further information, visit protopage.com/mobile on your mobile phone.

Protopage has a very neat Web 2.0-oriented design and the ability to view multiple RSS feeds in a single module puts this start page right up there among the best.

For those of you that are just beginning to use customized homepages, Pageflakes might be just the right choice. It has an easy to use drag and drop function, an appealing default template, and adding widgets, or as they call them – “flakes” – is really a piece of cake. Just pick any of your favorite news feeds, videos, pictures, or anything else you might find necessary, and add them to your flakes, or create your own custom flakes. In addition, you can also access publicly shared homepages, which are called “Pagecasts”.

Pageflakes customized homepages are also used by small businesses for shared message boards and calendars, as well as for managing customer information and projects. In addition, it also allows third party module-creation, which is actually a compulsory feature more than a big plus, since Microsoft and Google also have this feature.

However, a lot of users complained back in 2008 when there were a few days when they could not connect to the service. Unfortunately, this episode has repeated several times and there are a lot of comments on Twitter from people wondering if Pageflakes is actually dead and buried or if they could at least get their content back. Sadly, there is no one on Twitter to address these complaints, so a lot of people have joined Netvibes instead. I guess it just remains to be seen if Pageflakes will make full recovery or not.

The number of people using Netvibes showed a rapid increase, which was probably due to the application’s interactive nature and flexibility and to its translation to various languages. The application is very easy to use and no registration is required. However, you can register with your email address and a password if you want to access your homepage from another computer. The goal is to have your customized homepage available whenever and wherever you need to access it, to gather all the important information for you in a single place on the Internet.

In a continuous wish to improve, Netvibes launched its fifth generation customized homepage, Wasabi, on December 9th, 2009 in Paris, at one of Europe’s foremost Internet conferences, Le Web. Wasabi offers users a totally new experience of the real-time Web with its Smart Reader that keeps the most appreciated widgets constantly updated, so that you won’t have to hit that refresh button ever again. Thanks to the Netvibes Smart Reader and Instant Update Technology, you won’t have to wait for hours to get your Twitter or Facebook update, because the content is updated in near real-time. In addition, Netvibes Wasabi also gives you the possibility to publish your customized homepages and interactive websites for free. It’s fast, it’s easy, and you have a multitude of visual design tools and page publishing features to choose from.

Netvibes has shown great success, especially among companies. There are over one thousand renowned brands, interactive agencies, government and non-profit organizations using its customized homepages. But that doesn’t mean individuals can’t benefit from it, as Netvibes’ complex services are just as much for individuals as they are for companies.

If you’re a constant user of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Music and other Yahoo features, MyYahoo! is probably the best choice for you. In addition, you can enjoy the comfort of simultaneously checking your Yahoo e-mail and reading news or other types of information, all from the same sign-in screen. The e-mail preview is automatically updated and you can have a quick summarized view of the message content in a small infotip window by simply moving your mouse over a message subject.

MyYahoo! has a fresh, modern look and you have a variety of themes and colors to choose from for your homepage and with its new Web 2.0 design, you’ll surely find something you’ll like. Some of the themes use simple colors, while others use advanced textures and background patterns.

A great disadvantage however might be the decreased available workspace due to the large portion dedicated to ads. This might be a little too hard to overcome, especially for those of you who are productivity-oriented. But everyone knows their priorities best and every customized homepage is designed for its specific users, so some of you might not even find the lack of space such a disadvantage, especially in comparison with all the great features MyYahoo! has to offer.

If you’re already using Google as your search engine, and if you’re particularly dedicated to it, iGoogle is probably the best choice for a customized homepage. It has a cleaner look than the other customized homepages, and you have all that unused space on the Google main page to fill with your favorite news feeds or any other information you find useful.

It is mind-blowing to see how many gadgets a customized homepage like iGoogle supports. Just think of any widget you might need, and there probably is an iGoogle tool to handle it. Use the “drag and drop” function to place the content you’re interested in below the search box on Google and can keep it simple with the iGoogle plug-ins by making a to-do list to manage your tasks, building up a calendar to keep track of all the important events in your life, booking flights and hotel rooms, and many other things, all from the same Web portal.

Google doesn’t care if your e-mail or your other tools are powered by different companies and have different domains, you can manage them all from a single place. Besides, the Gadget API is open to developers, which allows third-party companies to write their own gadgets, and which will probably produce many more new gadgets.

iGoogle’s integration with Google Docs comes as a big plus, so we’ll just wait and see what Google’s customized homepage has to offer next to its users, because it surely still has a lot more to offer.