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.
And to celebrate the new release they gave us all a bonus of 51k readers
Interesting. But it seems Netvibes is evolving into a “normal” RSS reader with just some funny Ajax stuff. This may seem a strange comment, but creating your own pages with your selection of feeds….seems very much 2004, which doesnt need to be bad. One must say that they succeed in hyping this, techcrunch playing an interesting role.
Now, if they could take away all the “system errors”, I might come back as user sometime.
I’ve been working on my own “Netvibes” type site when time allows. You can check it out at
http://www.myownsite.us
It’s turned into a collective effort (open source) where additional functionality such as weather, etc. will soon be added.
Joakim,
I agree. Does anyone have any stats on the usage of these AJAX Homepages? Everyone seems to talk about them, but I don’t know anyone who actually *uses* them. RSS readers seem to do the trick for most of it.
Netvibes is the best !!! I use this all the time !!!
My life would be a mess without Basecamp and Netvibes.
Now we just need Basecamp plug-in for Netvibes.
I liked their keyboard shortcuts, eases out a lot of things for me.
And the eco system is even nicer, i never knew there were so many things avialable with netvibes.
I use the hell out of netvibes. I have a lot of different PCs in different physical locations and having access to my box.net account, all my bookmarks, all my favorite sites and important news in one location is a huge boon to me.
Yesterday I realized that I have forgotten how to use the Internet without NetVibes to guide me. What a beautiful tool.
Dunno where Josh has been, but I don’t know of anything more useful than Netvibes for keeping on top of what’s going on. RSS readers just don’t do it – any of those got a nice, fully configurable interface, API, tabbed browsing, notes, to-do’s, mini browsers, search…? Nope. I’ve never kept a homepage for more than a couple of weeks. Netvibes has been mine for months. Rock on.
Due to a certain amount of advocacy on the part of TechCrunch, I checked out NetVibes and I’ve got to say it does it for me. I’m a latecomer to the whole RSS feed thing so haven’t used readers in the past but I now use NetVibes constantly to keep on top of breaking tech news from feeds like TechCrunch. Tis phat.
This looks almost exactly the same as pageflakes.com (I have no idea which came first)… it seems to be less buggy, but has way fewer plugins… is there any case to use both sites?
I use netvibes.com, it’s great. This addition is just what I thought was missing when I signed up also.
Someone asked in the comments about who uses these Ajax desktops. Well I, for one, have become addicted to Protopage.com – I no longer surf the web without this being open as the first tab in my Firefox.
I’ve tried some of the others, but in my opinion NetVibes, though it has a lot of functionality – it just looks so square, I think it’s kind of unattractive. I think they’d improve the site just by having rounded corners on their module tables.
…Sounds like a superficial thing, but if you make something like this your startpage on the internet, you’re going to be looking at it constantly, and its appearance has to appeal to you. Which is one of the big reasons why I like the highly customizable layouts and background of ProtoPage.
I also use the ProtoPage built-in RSS Reader and now no longer run an extra newsreader application, which is handy. I am wondering however, where the monetization comes into these desktops as I have yet to see any advertising on any of them ! And making a site your startpage must add up on the server’s bandwidth…
I am one of the Techcrunch reader crew of geeks that tries out most of the products mentioned on the blog.
Then we all debate whether an idea is any good.
I’d be interested in more follow up articles or surveys polls on certain sites to see how we all feel three months later.
Google Notebook. Never touched it again, etc.
But Netvibes? FOR ME, this is the one of the few products that I regularly use to organize my online life. I just plain find it useful. And it is so clearly and regularly improving. Long may it continue.
Pageflakes has lots of great widgets and I can understand those loyal to it, but (for no good reason) I just dont like it as much.
I am a Protopage user and have been happy with it for several months. The technology is cooler than the other 4-5 AJAX home pages I considered. However there are precious few widgets for it. Not sure where they’re headed with it. My second favorite is Pageflakes and thanks to Firefox’s tabs I can start with both. Pageflakes goes on the second tab though because it takes a while to load.
The one thing that turns me off about NetVibes (also about Meebo and others) is that in order to aggregate your eBay, Yahoo, delicious and other data feeds, you’ll have to trust them with your login and password from those site. And I just can’t.
In general, I like Netvibes but there are some things that drive me nuts about it. With GMail, it takes it a long time for it to set it back to zero after I read new mail…. not that big of a deal, but irritating that I have to manually refresh it. The other thing is that there’s a bug in it that occaisionally sets all the posts from blogs back to unread… this happens about once a day for me.
back to unread… this happens about once a day for me.