At zdnet. Not very comprehensive, but it does mention the two distinct groups:
1) The big guns: Microsoft (live.com), the Google Personalized Homepage and Yahoo (My Yahoo, which is still mostly an old-style portal).
2) The little companies: Netvibes, Protopage, pageflakes, a href=”http://www.cfempire.com/home/”>HomePortals, Goowy and a host of other contenders.
One of the comments pretty much encapsulates my feeling about these, though…
Tweet ThisAll these AJAX homepages seem to provide nothing more than Google Search, RSS Feeds, and a weather applet/gadget/widget. The problem is there’s no business model in something my browser can provide me – either through built-in functionality, RSS feeds, or bookmarks (remember them?).
There’s only value in an AJAX homepage if you can do something more with the components available. Assuming you can get the AJAX-world to settle down, and decide on the right way to do AJAX, then you have the problem of the “walled garden”, i.e. who owns the customer ?
For example, say I wanted to “mash up” my GMail client, with my Plaxo contacts, and Flickr photos, so I could create a not -too-far-fetched super-web2.0-mail-client. I would need a environment that makes those APIs available , a simple -to-use programming language to foster a development community/ecosystem, and a slick AJAX GUI builder. All online, otherwise you would remain dependent on in-house development staff.
I don’t see this happening for a while yet. We still have a couple of hurdles to overcome: a common system for user authentication, webservice standards (SOAP that works seamlessly across multiple vendors/platforms?), and reliable CSS2 across IE and Firefox to name a few.