Move from protopage to pageflakes? or Netvibes?

I've been using protopage as a startpage (though you won't see all the sticky notes I use most often which are on a private page 1) and I love the way the sticky notes can be any size at all plus can overlap and can be minimised to expand when a mouse pointer hovers over it.



However one major limitation which I'll go into in a sec puts finding an alternative on my todo list. It is one of the less important tasks but I'm working on the search now thanks to Bloglines, Dave's [old] blog, Brett Kelly, and my boys being away. If I hadn't started a Bloglines account I wouldn't have been scrolling through back posts of Dave's old blog, and wouldn't have read his comments on Netvibes, so I wouldn't have been reminded of my dissatisfaction with protopage.

Which is... although it is wonderful that one can create different pages for different topical areas or different tools, those different pages are numbered. I had to create an index sticky - and copy it to each page, and if I change the pages around - change index sticky. Of course I could just remember which page is which - but another wonderful thing about protopage is that one can make one or all of the pages public. I've looked at others' protopages, seen others have gone to the bother of creating index stickies too and wonder at our tenacity.

This objection is heightened since I picked up google notebook - when notebook is open it covers the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 page links in the bottom right hand corner.

Netvibes looked like it offered a lot, but on first glance not much that protopage doesn't, and a lot of things I just don't use even at protopage - in particular I noticed all the modules are in columns so they don't appear to have the flexibility in page layout offered by protopage (I still love being able to move the sticky notes around and resize them at will). Being a novice user of protopage anyway (I don't even have pictures up yet), I thought I'd look for expert comparisons.

While I didn't find any - I did discover Brett Kelly's review of Netvibes and Pageflakes.

I was impressed that he believed Pageflakes to be a superior product, "hands-down", even though he'd be staying with netvibes until Pageflakes offer a manual refresh and get the Ma.gnolia module working right. Now I don't intend to use a startpage for feeds or reading email so refreshing doesn't bother me and I don't even know yet what Ma.gnolia *is* (... ah looks like a social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us?), so could Pageflakes be worth a look?

Another quick search revealed a possibly not impartial perspective: Web-Based Desktop Startpage Pageflakes - rev2.org which I might have dismissed but for:

"Pages
The thing that differentiates Pageflakes with some other startpages is that instead of having just one 'desktop' or page, you can create as many as you like. For example, I can create a page called 'News' and have kinds of news 'flakes' like BBC, Reuters, AP, and so on. Upon that, I can have another page called 'RSS' with just my RSS feeds on it. Then I can have 'Tools' with calculators and dictionaries and converters, and so on".

Named pages with the names as top-tabs - that's what I'd like, although I'll miss the huge flexibility of positioning, sizing and overlapping with stickies.

So, now to give it a go?...

UPDATE: 29 November 2006: I didn't have to... I went to comment to protopage about my need and discovered that a v.3 was in the works so I've been waiting and .... hooray!