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November 22, 2006

Make Your Own Netvibes Modules With Dapper

Marshall Kirkpatrick

24 comments »

Mashup creation tool Dapper announced today that its users can now easily create new modules from any data source for placement in the popular start page Netvibes. Dapper is a company that’s either glorifying screen scraping or leading the charge towards data portability, depending on your perspective. I like it a lot. Working with Dapper to enable fast user creation of new modules is a nice competitive advantage for Netvibes. Our previous coverage of Netvibes is here and of Dapper here.

Dapper first made the scene with the release of a tool called Blotter that displays any blog’s Technorati link data over time in a graph. The company has been on an innovation blitz lately, see for example the company’s recent proof of concept called Snag - a service that aggregates all your friends, updates and messages across LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Hi5. That was the first showcase of Dapper’s newly added support for incorporating data sources that require login and it’s just plain useful.

Dapper users use a point and click interface to grab changes to data over time on any website. That data can then be delivered in any number of different formats, including RSS, iCal, Google Maps or many others. Dapper hopes that in addition to the relatively simple functionality it now brings to Netvibes, they hope to include more interactive features in their modules and extend this service out to more start pages and widget platforms as users request them and company’s approve.

Dapper reports that they have much more in the works and a User Interface overhaul is near the top of their priorities. That’s great news as the site certainly needs one. Once the service becomes even easier to use, I expect to see Dapper implementations flourish around the web all the more.

Update: Scott Matthews emailed me again after I posted this and reminded me once more that I could have and should have mentioned BittyBrowser as another way to bring Dapper built RSS feeds into Netvibes and many similar places. Matthews deserves a lot of credit as well for his work on making data portability a reality in the emerging web.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. links for 2006-11-23 « Breyten’s Dev Blog

    November 23rd, 2006 at 3:17 am

  2. ernest.blog » Blog Archive » Netvibes 加上 Dapper

    November 24th, 2006 at 7:31 pm

  3. TechCrunch en français » Recap2.0: les autres billets de la semaine de TechCrunch.com (19 nov/26 nov. 06)

    November 26th, 2006 at 2:58 am

  4. Make Your Own Netvibes Modules With Dapper at Basement Tapes

    November 26th, 2006 at 6:01 pm

  5. masey » A Snapshot of November 2006

    December 2nd, 2006 at 1:09 am

  6. 5 Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash Your Data

    March 23rd, 2007 at 6:55 pm

  7. techcrunch » Blog Archive » Five Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash Your Data

    August 14th, 2007 at 5:02 am

  8. Mundo Linear » 5 Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash Your Data

    September 13th, 2007 at 4:44 pm

  9. links for 2007-03-24 | After The Dot Net

    September 18th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

Comments

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  1. Uri L.

    November 22nd, 2006 at 10:48 am

    One of the most interesting projects by all means.

  2. Matt

    November 22nd, 2006 at 10:53 am

    I like the concept of Snag because it’s a simple way to aggregate a certain type of informationin one spot. It’s an interested way that a lot of services are moving to leverage existing data sources (social networking message inboxes in this case) and combine them in one interface.

    It’s all about having your relevant data accessable to you through a simple tool. In the case of Snag though, there is a limit to what you can do. While it is useful for the message aggregation it does not necesarily help manage or improve the connections you have with the people with whom you interact.

    We are doing some cool stuff over at Convos (www.convos.com) that is in aiming to solve the similar problems of having information in different accounts but allowing people to perform tasks with that information.

    I like the concept of simple aggregation combined with the ability to be productive with that aggregated data. Looking forward to seeing how this proof of concept plays out.

  3. Hailey

    November 22nd, 2006 at 11:06 am

    Interesting product, and could become very popular. I’ve been using http://www.feedyes.com to scrape websites and adding them as RSS feed to my Netvibes page. Keeps me up to date on specific pages on the net that do not have feeds. What’s interesting is that I’m not the only one who combines feedyes.com and netvibes: http://www.feedyes.com/mfeedit.....temid=1200

  4. Masey

    November 22nd, 2006 at 11:26 am

    If anyone wants a hand in getting started with Netvibes, I have created a tutorial on how to get started.

  5. Kev

    November 22nd, 2006 at 11:30 am

    Very nice article!
    :)

  6. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    November 22nd, 2006 at 11:41 am

    Masey, that’s a great tutorial! Thanks for posting it here. Once Dapper becomes more usable, I’d love to see a Masey tutorial on how to use it too. Are you familiar with the fabulous work of Molly McDonald at Screeniac.com? http://www.screeniac.com/ You should check her work out too; she makes really cool Flash screencasts of lots of new web sites.

  7. Razvan Antonescu

    November 22nd, 2006 at 12:07 pm

    If someone could create a tutorial on how to make a module based on Google’s CSE amd its labels my day will be perfect. Is obsessing me already

  8. m. oliver fresnell

    November 22nd, 2006 at 12:25 pm

    “…easily create new modules”? a nifty idea, I get it - but damn that tutorial was just plain painful to watch and even more painful to actually make a “Dapp”.

  9. Luca Cremonini

    November 22nd, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    Aggregation, mash-up and collaboration, combined with new technologies like Ruby on Rails and Ajax are clearly the ingredients of next generation web applications. Web 2.0 software needs to be simple, fast developed and with innovative design. Ruby on Rails it’s a must.

  10. Scott Matthews (Bitty Browser)

    November 22nd, 2006 at 3:57 pm

    For those of you interested in creating modules/widgets/gadgets, come check out my web app Bitty Browser. Basically, you can point Bitty to a Web/RSS/OPML URL — and then easily add it to services like Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, TypePad, WordPress, Live.com, etc. — or to most any site/blog via an HTML copy/paste. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via the Bitty site… -Scott

  11. moataz

    November 22nd, 2006 at 5:25 pm

    Snag looks very cool. Our website, http://iceflake.com , also has the same concept. If I had known about dapper before we started work on this, we probably would have used it to build our site.

  12. Anthony

    November 22nd, 2006 at 7:20 pm

    Dapper has been around for a little while and I used it for a number of applications. This is a really good idea and im sure it will take off

  13. Brian

    November 23rd, 2006 at 6:11 am

    I’m still wondering about copyright issues with services like Netvibes. Basically they allow users or are stealing themselves content: Displaying Google Results directly on their page without Google’s AdSense, copying Alexa Charts, etc. etc etc.

    Isn’t that a similar sort of stealing that YouTube’s users have done with uploading copyrighted material?

    Sounds weird to me and think that companies will may be get into legal action.

  14. Jon

    November 23rd, 2006 at 8:38 am

    Hey Brian,

    I agree with you there, scrapping content off of CNN or any website and making money without their permission seems like a big no no.

    It’s unclear how these services respect the ‘Terms of Use’ of most websites.

  15. Molly

    November 23rd, 2006 at 9:40 am

    Thanks Marshall!

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