Start page 2.0 ?

I thought we’d witnessed the death of the whole custom start page thing after the first bubble burst (am I subconsciously expecting another? Yessssss..., but I digress...), however they’ve been resurrected with a vengeance. They aggregate external content now instead of following the old walled garden model of their predecessors and they’ve been spiced up with flash or all kinds of ajaxy eye-candy goodness, but the principle remains the same: a single start page condensing everything you read or need into a bite-sized chunk of html.

I’ve tried or at least checked out a lot of them: Google IG, Netvibes, protopage, suprglu, goowy, even My Yahoo and most recently Microsoft’s very own Windows Live which, not surprisingly, didn’t work too well on a mac. None of them got past the novelty barrier for me. There’s a lot of information out there and I like absorbing it through separate channels instead of a giant scrapbook. NetNewswire for RSS feeds and opening everything else in multiple browser tabs gives me a better experience.

Now, granted, I probably ingest more online information daily than many people and maybe I’m just turning into a grumpy old bastard (probable...) but the whole idea of a start page seems as bad now as it did back in the days of My Excite or whatever it was called. So my question is: do any of you use these services on a regular basis? And if you do, what do you like about them? If you don’t, how do you sort through all that daily noise? Are these start pages a passing fad or a useful online tool that liberates you from the desktop?

As I type, another one is getting ready to join the flock: Zoozio. It’s getting crowded in that space, what am I missing?