James Mowery at Mashable provided a Startpage Showdown with 14 contenders. There was no clear winner, and nothing that made me think that I should switch away from iGoogle.
There are actually more than 14 contenders. James made that very point early in his post: “Pageflakes is adding a social network, which seems to be the next evolution of the start page concept. Meanwhile, Facebook is looking increasingly like a startpage.”
For my personal use, I see my start page and my social network as rather different things. The start page is for me to look at the web. My profile on a social network is for the web to look at me. There is overlap, perhaps less for me than for many others.
Even if we exclude social networks, there are more than 14 start page contenders. At least one has already been pointed out in a comment on James’ post.
The newest contender of which I am aware is Zude, which Phil Butler at RWW described as “start page on steroids.” I see from comments that I was not alone in having trouble signing up for the beta. I’ll give it another try…