New Look For Netvibes

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1. rj
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 9:16 pm

   Definitely have to agree with you on that. Netvibes is my go to source for all of the sneaker/modern urban culture/web 2.0 news I digest daily!!

2. john
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 9:20 pm

   The only significant addition is their MySpace module, which is anything but significant. It is obvious the myspace widget was created by developers and techies who know nothing about myspace, how people use it, and pop culture. I don’t see how that widget ads any value to netvibes or myspace users. Since more and more profiles on myspace are going private, I don’t see how netvibes can get the data from those profiles, since they depend on html scraping. Furthermore, I wonder what MySpace thinks about what netvibes has done. Based on how they shut down much smaller site from doing similar things, netvibes might be forced to shut down the widget.

3. Ping Liang
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 9:26 pm

   Mike,
   With tabbed browsers, I put all the sites I regularly visit in one folder and they are all open when I open the browser. I get to see the whole page of each site with one click instead of a whole page full of tiny boxes, e.g., I get to see the full page TechCrunch with the click of one tab.

   What are the web services that you use that make Netvibes the better choice over multiple tabs in a browser?

4. Michael Arrington
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 9:38 pm

   Ping - there are two reasons I think it’s better. First, you can access a ton of services on a single page, saving clicks. And second, you don’t have to go to the trouble of loading each application separately each time. You just open netvibes and it’s there. It definitely works for me, although I’ve a heavy tab user in Firefox as well.

5. The Real Deal
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

   I use netvibes one of the few services on the web I actually use - you know how I test if a service is good ? If they get my “real e-mail address” this one got it - all the other places gets my junk e-mail on registration lol

6. Blind
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 10:28 pm

   It is interesting that you use a 5M user number. A few months ago I think that they used a 8M user number when they announced their financing. I personally believe that both numbers are bogus and would be very very surprised if netvibes had more and 500K active users.

   Don’t get me wrong, I think that Netvibes is a good app BUT 1) it is completely way overhyped and 2) there is absolutely ZERO defensible technology. This is simple clever use of Javascript and clearn design. There is nothing in here that Yahoo, Microsoft, Google or any other large consumer web site would not be able to replicate in a matter months.

   They better find a buyer before they run out of the $15M funding they recently raised.

7. Presentlight
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 10:31 pm

   Here is my rational for using Netvibes:

   1) With it I can organize my 60 some-odd RSS feeds.
   2) It has several modules like the Comic book module which makes it easy for me to get all of my daily comics(Dilbert,Foxtrot,etc.) in one spot by simply dragging my mouse over them, even the comics that don’t have RSS.

   3) Google is RIGHT THERE, allowing the search resultsto appear within the search module, saving precious screen space.
   4) It has a simplistic UI and it doesn’t overwhelm me with color.
   5) It has nice personalization features like choosing icons for my own tabs (netvibes has tabs in its own page, much like Firefox, Opera, and IE 7).
   6) I can parse all of my news headlines without opening the 20-30 windows that i would need to otherwise.
   7) netvibes will play embedded video from blogs on the Netvibes page.

8. Ole Brandenburg
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 10:35 pm

   The new design is nice, no doubt. The MySpace application is a nice new add-on too, no doubt. Calling it a whole new release is a bit over the top though, but that’s just my opinion. Also, I am getting a bit worried about the inflational use of user numbers. 5 million users - based on what metric? Signups? Daily return visitors? Cookies set? Total monthly visits? It would be good to have a mutually accepted (and realistic) figure so we can actually really compare performance and growth on a fair level.

   All that said, congrats to Netvibes for their continuous effort.

   Cheers
   Ole

9. Fergy
   

   September 30th, 2006 at 11:14 pm

   I think netvibes has a huge learning curve in terms of its overall functionality. I’m a smart person, I have a computer science degree and I’m a web programmer, and I still haven’t figured out how to use some of the advanced features let alone the simple stuff. If any website’s going to be successful, it needs to be loads simpler than netvibes. That’s seriously where I’m coming from.

10. Michelle
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 11:27 pm

    check out http://www.koolim.com

11. steve
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 11:52 pm

    I am a huge Netvibes fan. Have used it every day for ages. One of the few new Web 2.0 products that I have sick with

    But frankly I can see virtually no difference with this update - and certainly would not have noticed anything if not heralded in various headlines. I guess I am missing something.

12. Ping Liang
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 12:24 am

    If you have a small number of applications and feeds, it may work fine. But when you subscribe to a large number of feeds, say, 100 or more, loading up the page in Netvibes takes many many minutes. Plus, reading hundreds of headlines in many tens of little boxes is a challenge.

13. Ted
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 12:44 am

    I like netvibes but to truly win me over you need to be able to aggregate feeds better.

14. Michael Arrington
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 12:54 am

    I agree - I don’t use Netvibes as a feed reader, but I do use it to view Flickr pictures, for personal storage, weather, etc. It’s an infinitely customizable personal portal.

15. Steve E
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 2:03 am

    I use Netvibes as my homepage, have for ages. Bit dissapointed with one change they’ve made… They’ve made links in feeds extend beyond the text meaning there’s much less ’safe’ space on the screen to click on without activating a link. I often have multiple apps open and Netvibes full screen behind them, but if you now click on Netvibes to bring it into focus you run much more risk of clicking a link.

    It’s a simple thing, but affects the usability of the page considerably and will get very annoying very quickly!

    They could do with a few lessons in usability best practice in my opinion.

16. Advanced Task Manager 3
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 2:46 am

    Hmm. I have visited NetVibes (I visit it quite often) and it doesn’t look like an update. Very little has changed.

17. JFB
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 3:22 am

    I like Netvibes a lot, and not only because they are French.
    I use them as my landing page to the internet. It’s my personal portal. I use it as a RSS feed reader, to check my Gmail accounts, weather forecast, listen to my favorite music feeds, etc.
    It’s not like tab browsing with firefox, as you don’t always actually visit the sites. It’s more like an desktop app within the browser.
    I don’t see much change in their new version, except the new colors, and the Myspace module, maybe.
    However, their great idea has been the Netvibes Ecosystem, where people can contribute to new modules…
    Un grand coup de chapeau les gars !

18. elvirs
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 3:53 am

    i use netvibes for feeds and it performs good for me.
    ping, if you have sth like 100 feeds, put them to divide them to four main groups and make four tabs on netvibes each page for each group of feeds, then you will have 4 pages of 25 feeds on each which will load faster and will make for you easier to navigate.

19. Angel
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 4:45 am

    I’m a huge Netvibes fan and when the post about “changing the way we use the web” came in on their feed last night, I was excited. Unfortunately, I can’t tell what I should have been excited about…..I don’t really notice any changes at all.

20. Jeff
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 7:18 am

    Anyone out here got any idea what they are going to do with those 15m?

    Anyone out here got any idea how they plan to pay it back?

    If so, please educated me

21. Willem
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 7:29 am

    It all looks like the good old pointcast network services, but more or less web 2.0 compliant.

22. anonymous netvibes user
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 11:56 am

    on the subject of the number of netvibes users:

    first of all, did tariq or someone from netvibes definitely state that they have 5 million (active) users? i’ve heard this figure banded about but haven’t seen it on the netvibes website or on anything official.

    now i’m sure many of the people reading techcrunch are developers and have the firefox web-dev extension installed or some other way to easily view the cookies of a site. try this:

    open netvibes. look at the cookies. there is one called activeUserID - for me this is around 450,000. Now sign out. and refresh the page. it is now 3,821,636. clear your cookies and wait a few minutes - refresh again. its now: 3,821,673. clearing cookies again, it’s now: 3,821,722.

    i’m fairly certain that this implies the total number of netvibes users is more like 3,800,000. this being total users. certainly not ‘active’ users, which i’d imagine, for obvious reasons is far far less. more than half that amount would be very optimistic.

    if someone from netvibes can tell me that this is not in fact a reliable way of finding the number of users then please do. if not then i think it makes the $15mil investment seem even more ridiculous! just throwing a few figures around, assuming 1.5mil ‘active’ users, and assuming that the $15mil investment would have been for no more than 50% of the company, that values the company at $30mil, or $20 per user. is it me or is that quite high?

    apologies for posting anonymously. i still think netvibes is a fantastic website!

23. Eric
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 12:18 pm

    On the subject of feeds, I don’t use Netvibes to read feeds, per se. But there’s a lot of feeds out there I’m interested in but I don’t load into my feed reader (Exclusively Google Reader now) because:

    1. They have way too many items and would drown out any blog that only posts once a day or less.
    2. I don’t care about day old items.

    These generally include news sites and status feeds. My netvibes page lets me look at a glance what the latest headlines are from a dozen of my preferred news sites. I don’t care about reading every story like I do with my Reader feeds, but I can scan all the headlines pretty quickly and open those that interest me, ignoring the rest.

    Now, if they’d just add a Google Reader module like what’s available for Google IG….

    On the subject at hand: What have they changed, exactly? It doesn’t look like there’s any new functionality… they just prettyfied it a little bit and re-arranged the available modules. Given the headline, I’d expected a lot more.

24. Árni Gunnar
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 1:14 pm

    To the anonymous Netvibes user: I have user ID 6549 And I have just loved Netvibes since I registered as a user, and I just wrote a little article on my site on them.

25. Ivan Pope
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    This article links Om Malik as backup for the 5m user reference. Om references Tariq Krim. When Om wrote the original piece, I wrote this:

    ‘Krim says his company now has five million active users and growing fast’
    But maybe not as fast as it was.
    In March 2006 TechCrunch reported that ‘Over a million home pages have been created on Netvibes’ (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/22/netvibes-to-announce-seed-financing-today/)
    In June 2006 Nial Kennedy references Tariq quoting four million users, ‘Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation’
    (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/06/netvibes-4-million.html)
    This month the number is five million from Tariq’s own mouth (above).
    So:
    1 million in the first six months (average 166,000 per month)
    Then it jumps to around 1 million new users in April and over 1 million new users in May to get to 4 million in June.
    Then, inexplicibly, it slows right down, because over the next three months, they only add another 1 million users.

    It looks very strange on a chart. Either the numbers they are quoting are wrong - or their growth is slowing down. Wonder which it is?

26. GP
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 8:42 pm

    Netvibes is cool and amaze you the first few times you load…but after sometime the reality of seting a slow loading website as your browser homepage sets in.

    So i reverted back to my trusted about:blank homepage!

27. Bill L.
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 9:39 pm

    Thanks, I have checked netvibes out for the first time and like what I see.

28. Arjun
    

    October 2nd, 2006 at 2:05 am

    this is hands down the best customizable portal page around

29. Marina making pictures
    

    October 2nd, 2006 at 3:42 am

    Netvibes seems to react to the recent update of google reader, which is far more useable, if you have to manage very many feeds.

    Thank you for sharing this story with me !

30. Enrique
    

    October 2nd, 2006 at 9:43 am

    Following Alexa, their traffic wents up to rank 474, that’s what I call a good release

    http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....tvibes.com

31. ben
    

    October 2nd, 2006 at 11:12 am

    I’ve resisted the urge to switch to netvibes from google.com/ig, the main draw was the ability to organize with tabs… but then google added that.

    What are some of the features netvibes offers that google/ig does not? I’m not even a gCal user (I use 30boxes), but the integration with search and email is a perfect synergy for me.

32. Johnny
    

    October 27th, 2006 at 2:26 am

    i only recently stumbled accross netvibes and have to say that from a user experience point of view I find it stunning. From a technology point of view this is the smoothest integrated non-big-corporation app that allows multiple assets to be present & usabel in the one view. This is a massive plus for any user of the internet who is information hungry and low on patience.

    From the point of view of user figures, how best could you describe a user of netvibes, somebody who checks it out once, somebody who sets up their own view on the net on netvibes, somebody who comes back and views it every day for a month, a year?

    For a young company to be ranked 575 in page views by Alexa is pretty impressive. It’s also obvious that they are continuing to grow in stature as their daily visitor numbers are climbing every day.

    Who knows what they will do with the investment they’ve recieved, but based on what they ahve produced so far, I can’t imagine it will be wasted!

33. Eric
    

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:35 am

    I think netvibes is hot, but its business model won’t be so hot.

    I did a strategic assessment of NetVibes at my blog.

    http://www.nextintuit.com/?p=9