One reason for a custom homepage is that bookmarks are not an adequate alternative. Most users will accumulate too many untagged bookmarks for the bulk of those bookmarks to do more than slow down the startup of their browser or slowdown the time it takes to open bookmarks or to create a bookmark.
A genuine alternative to a custom home page is to mind-map or concept-map those bookmarks with a separate application - browsers do not offer mind-mapping as a bookmarking feature.
A less appealing alternative is to use a "personal" page at a service such as Yahoo.
A bookmarking web service such as delicious can be used as an alternative - and delicious bookmarks can be mind-mapped - but I find that delicious is just one of many useful links that I want on my home page.
My own home page offers immediate links to two other local home pages on my netbook - they come up even before my wireless connection is reestablished. One local page is for things whose nexus is Aule browsers and the other is specifically for the Curl programming language and other languages useful for the web: Rebol, Icon, Logtalk, Oz, Smalltalk, JavaScript.
One thing distinctive about my home page is that it allows me to select a wikipedia search by language so that my search can begin at a Russian or a Spanish page instead of my usual French,English or German choices for fr.wikipedia.org or the en or de options. There is also a link to freebase and to page which is itself a good jumping off point with many links to the topic of RDF.
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