Opportunity for developer entrepreneur!

I know a little bit about pageflake. I think you need an architect instead of a developer.

Pageflakes' core implementation is .net with Microsoft's Atlas toolkit for ajax. It's spread over multiple servers and technologies, including support for java (as opposed to javascript), and php. One of it's major strengths is it's developer api which allows their community to build and deploy new features. Beyond the interface, there's technical details associated with maintaing a session across windows and unix clusters, providing scalability across the technologies, and in securely encapsulating what the 3rd party developers produce through the api so their servers don't come crashing down one day.

Pageflake was put together by a team of developers working towards an understood architecture.

There are a lot of development projects going on to clone pageflake. Many of them are php/mysql based and take the attitude that pageflakes strength is in the ajax. These projects will produce wannabee also-ran sites.

The investor community appreciates the back-end. Scalability and extensibility means a lot. Page flake has the capability built in to it's architecture to be more than it currently is. This is why the folks who funded ebay invested in pageflake a couple of weeks ago - not for what page flake is, but for what it can be.

Pageflake, since the round of funding, has advertised for a user interface wizzard. They're not staying still. You have to target what they will be, not what they are.

Being a first-mover in the internet space has it's advantages, but first-movers are often leap frogged by organizations that have a better vision, business plan, and technology base.  If you want to play in pageflakes' space, you need to scale up beyond the low-end entry point of that space.