It turns out that a lot of folks are doing the ajax-based web
front page thing. Alexander Larsson told me
about Netvibes, but there is
also fyuze, Protopage, and (how could I have
missed this?) Google
Reader. I would imagine that My Yahoo will move this direction
someday too.

Netvibes in particular looks amazingly similar to start.com.
Protopage is a bit different in that it appears to be more of a sticky
note and links holder — that’s a nice idea. I haven’t investigated,
I wonder if the pages are shareable. Anyway, the others should add
this functionality.