NetVibes gets an ecosystem

Paris/London based NetVibes, which provides a personalized Ajax homepage, released significant upgrades yesterday, including new plugins and community sharing features. Tariq Krim, NetVibes CEO took us through this new version.

First they have released 2 new plugins accessible in the default feed menu. One is displaying hottest digg news and the other helps you monitor Ebay activities. They have also released keyboard control that facilitates browsing and usage (edition, delete, help) within pages and tabs.

But the key innovation is elsewhere. NetVibes launched Ecosytem (accessible at eco.netvibes.com) which is a directory of contents and services for NetVibes that is managed by its users. It will enable anyone to easily create, share and rate any feed, plug-in or even tabs. You can directly add any item you wish within your NetVibes homepage directly from the directory just by clicking the “+” button. The directory can be browsed by item, tags and a search engine is also available. For example you can add a “web2.0” tab or a “world cup” tab to your homepage that include a good selection of feeds. And you can also populate the directory directly from your homepage by clicking the “publish to ecosystem” button present either on the left of the “refresh” feature on the top right of each “feed block” or within the menu of each tab (check screenshot on the side). You will then land to an editing page to give some detail on the item you wish to share (see screenshot below). Sharing is only public for now and i think it could be also great to have private sharing with your friends.

In other words NetVibes is more community oriented enabling users to interact with developers and vice-versa.

NetVibes has also released an API that enables the development on new plug-ins (more than 74 already present). 8 new were added since yesterday and some very interesting are on the way (video, netflix, myspace)

This happens right after PageFlakes announced an investment from Benchmark. It looks that the field competition is getting hotter.

More on NetVibes blog.