Personalized home page site Pageflakes allows you to customize a start page with flakes (the rest of the world calls them widgets, Microsoft calls them gadgets). Flakes include weather forecasts, email services, calendars, to-do lists, and RSS feeds.

Pageflakes has a repository of flakes, and it's about to get a lot bigger. CEO Dan Cohen says the company plans to offer a directory of 10,000 flakes starting next month. Now the thing about widgets that are embedded in web pages is that there's really only so many things you need them to do. Check your email, get maps, keep up on the latest blogs and news web sites, check stock quotes, etc.

I figure there's maybe a few dozen things I might want in a start page, tops. And once you put those few dozen things on a page it becomes cluttered and hard to read. Pageflakes gets around that problem a bit by providing you with tabs, allowing you to create as many custom pages as you'd like. Use one for work, one for checking stocks, another for reading your guilty pleasure blogs.

Some of the new flakes will let you do things like keep track of other users' MySpace pages or share photos. But still, 10,000 seems like an excessively large number of applications. My bet is that about 9,500 of those flakes will be RSS feeds for various web sites.