Today Netvibes announced a new feature of their “start” page. Starting in about six weeks users can create pages and “share” them with the public. This isn’t anything new for “start pages” in general. Protopage and Pageflakes will already let you do this.
The second (and I think more important) new feature is the addition of support for custom CSS and HTML. This could put Netvibes up there with Protopage when it comes to making a completely customizable start page. I’ll have to wait and see if the three column “lock” is still a part of the new features.