Dan Cohen, who joined the company as CEO last month after heading up personal home page efforts at Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., said the new centralized directory of "flakes," the company's name for its widgets, will make building a personalized home page easier. Flakes - named to evoke images of lightweight snowflakes or biscuit flakes - can be podcasts, RSS feeds, blogs or other content snippets that users can download.

"My vision and my passion is to make the personalized home page a mass market product," Cohen said. "That means someone like my mom, who is 70 years old ... would be able to use something like this and quickly set it up. The page would configure itself to her interest and needs."

Cohen also is aiming to differentiate San Francisco-based Pageflakes from Google and Yahoo's personalized page operations by supporting the community-driven page, where multiple users with a common interest can add content or edit a page, he said.

For example, Pageflakes has a teacher in a small school in Montana who has set up a Pageflakes page for students to view assignments and grades, Cohen said. Fans of the Fox television show "24" have set up a Pageflakes page, he added. One flake allows users to create their own blog on their page or on one that can be used by a community, he noted.

"A teacher, without the involvement of an IT professional and with no programming experience, can search the directory of flakes and add them to the page," he said. "With a few mouse clicks, you can set up a shared page for free that multiple people can use. It's like moving blocks around."