Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

This Good Morning Silicon Valley item from the estimable John Murrell quotes a Mercury News story that quotes an Internet industry insider as saying this:

“There’s not a lot of a zero-sum games, but there’s only one home page. There’s only one thing that is the first thing you see.”

The context is the (presumed) contest between Microsoft and Google for the right to buy an expensive chunk of Facebook, which serves as the home page — and locus of online operations — for zillions of hip Web users.

But here’s my more-than-a-grain of salt: Just how important is a home page? Is it any more important than the channel that happens to be on when you turn on your t.v.? Possibly I’m just misguided about this because I often have nothing as my home page and because I routinely start my online day by opening a raft of preset links all at once in Firefox. So I start my day with Hoover’s (of course), plus three e-mail accounts, plus my RSS reader, plus . . . well, there’s a bunch of stuff. Yeah, I check Facebook every day, too, but that usually comes somewhat later in the day.

Am I that weird? Or is a home page still that meaningful? To me it just seems to be a very 1998 concern.

Mind you, none of this should keep Microsoft and Google from ponying up for Facebook, which looks like a heck of an investment/partner from where I sit. But is the home-page real-estate issue a good reason why they should pony up?