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February 21, 2007

Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility

Michael Arrington

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The fragmentation of widget platforms presents a problem for developers, who need to develop and then maintain different versions of widgets for the various desktop widget platforms (Vista, Mac, Google, Yahoo) as well as online platforms like Pageflakes and Netvibes (and lots of others).

The W3C has a working draft of a 1.0 Widget specification, which if adopted would make life easier for developers by requiring some standardization. However, the best solution for everyone would be a world where a widget works on every platform, no matter where it was originally created.

Today at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Netvibes founder Tariq Krim announced that their upcoming “Coriander” release will do just that. The new product will be called the Universal Widget API and will be available at eco.netvibes.com/uwa (this site is live now with a landing page, more information will be available next week). Once launched, any widget created for Netvibes, Krim says, will work on the Vista, Google, Mac and Opera platforms as well. Support for Yahoo Widgets and other platforms will follow soon after.

A single javascript embed code will add the widget to any of the supported platforms. The code will recognize the platform and run the appropriate code for that platform within the widget. Once Coriander has launched, sites will be able to create and promote a single widget embed code for most platforms.

Krim showed me Netvibes widgets running on a Mac as well as Google. Screenshots below. For people familiar with the look and feel of Netvibes modules/widgets, they will be immediately apparent.

Krim also announced that Netvibes will be open sourcing the runtime at the same time as the platform launches, allowing anyone to expand the number of widget platforms supported. Expect smaller widget platforms to jump on this.

Netvibes now claims 10 million active users. Krim says 1/3 of those users spend at least an hour per day on Netvibes, and 10% have Netvibes open “virtually the entire day.” Krim also announced that Netvibes will be supporting OpenID this year.


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:35 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.

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Comments

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  1. John

    February 21st, 2007 at 8:45 am

    Tariq, tu cartonnes là!

  2. ...some Drifter

    February 21st, 2007 at 8:50 am

    whoa, to say the least.

  3. Chris

    February 21st, 2007 at 8:56 am

    Really impressed… Very good news for developers.

  4. Gareth

    February 21st, 2007 at 9:10 am

    Looks like this appeared a little early ;) Tariq hadn’t got on stage at the conference when this went live.

    Cool news though :)

  5. Andrew Kippen

    February 21st, 2007 at 9:14 am

    Great news! I love me some Netvibes.

  6. Damien Stevens

    February 21st, 2007 at 9:15 am

    Congratulations Tariq, that sounds like quite an accomplishment!

  7. Danny (Mesa Dynamics)

    February 21st, 2007 at 9:20 am

    Tariq is definitely thinking in the right direction, but again this is just a solution for NetVibes widgets — which IMHO is aimed at developers seeking to increase widget exposure — not customers.

    Users should be able to put any web widget on their OS X Dashboard or Vista Sidebar — and this is in fact possible today with Amnesty Generator for web widgets that allow cut/paste deployment. We’ll be releasing a new application soon that will make this process (of moving web widgets onto desktop environments) even more seamless.

    Nevertheless, the best news about NetVibes “single embed code” is that it sounds like we’ll be able to support their widgets as well. ;-)

  8. webmonkian

    February 21st, 2007 at 9:48 am

    IMHO 10 million users is complete BS. You can see how many users there are by viewing your cookies. Netvibes uses an integer for User IDs. Currently it’s up to about 8.1 million… And that includes the temp user IDs which are created when you visit the site with an un-cookied computer. You can test this quite simply - clear your cookies and visit the site. View your cookies (using firebug or something similar). Repeat. You will notice your user ID has gone up by 1 or 2 or 3 - this being the number of other new visitors who have visited in the time between.

    Okay, so if they’ve got 8.1 million ‘accounts’, the likelihood that most of these are the temp accounts is quite high - i.e. they are not attached to an email address because the user simply hasn’t registered or has signed in under another account - thus the temp user ID is lost in the void. I would estimate the number of ‘real’ users at about 1-2 million, and from that, the number of ‘active’ or regular users at 1/10 of that - so between 100-200k.

    Their supposedly ‘massive’ growth rate is also contradicted by the Alexa data - Alexa isn’t exactly the most accurate source, but it’s most certainly indicative:
    http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....tvibes.com

    If Tariq or someone from Netvibes would like to prove me wrong, I’d be very happy to hear their explanation, but I think they are greatly risking their credibility on this topic if I’m proved to be right. I guess we’ll never know… What I’m so suprised about is the fact that people so blindly just believe these figures without even questioning them - especially as they’ve been touted round on so many web2.0 websites!

  9. whoopee

    February 21st, 2007 at 9:51 am

    netvibes is cute…the first time you load it. whee! i can drag my modules! the second time, okay, still cute. the third time…why is this taking so long? the fourth time…THIS @#$@#$ PAGE IS SLOW…there is no fifth time.

  10. adam

    February 21st, 2007 at 10:15 am

    why does know one ever think of the linux users?!?!?!?!

    seriously it gets quite annoying …………

  11. James

    February 21st, 2007 at 10:21 am

    whopee is right. Netvibes is fine as long as you stick to the basic RSS feed module and maybe the basic flickr and video modules already listed in the sidebar on your netvibes page. Add anything else and netvibes SPEED goes down the toilet.

    BTW, I’ve been using netvibes for the past couple of weeks after trying several other personalized pages. I like to see my feeds on a bunch of personalized tabs rather than in a feedreader per se. Don’t get me wrong, netvibes is nice. You just have to know its limitations.

    This cross platform stuff will be fine for teenagers who are just playing around with a netvibes page (i.e. the myspace flashing gadgets and gizmos crowd). Anybody else should just forget it. This announcement by Mr. Krim is much ado about nothing.

  12. Martin Kelley

    February 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am

    “Krim says 1/3 of those users spend at least an hour per day on Netvibes, and 10% have Netvibes open ‘virtually the entire day.’”

    Wait, you can close Netvibes? You don’t have to have it up the entire day? Huh. Well I guess that’s a useful feature but why would anyone want it?

    Seriously, nice to see Widgets standards coming together.

  13. CHEF

    February 21st, 2007 at 10:31 am

    The W3C has a working draft of a 1.0 Widget specification, which if adopted would make life easier for developers by requiring some standardization. However, the best solution for everyone would be a world where a widget works on every platform, no matter where it was originally created.

    JSR 168 and WSRP? LOL.

  14. Bill Minton

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:10 am

    I’m not sure widgets are the way to go. In Vista, I immediately shut that sidebar off, and never cared for konfabulator. I like the Netvibes concept, which is the reason I built (and am still building) http://www.MyOwnSite.us but it’s doubtful I’ll ever get to the point of adding widgets to it. I read an article where one of the top Netvibes guys was interviewed though, and he definitely things they are the next big thing.

    What I want is a slick, fast way to get information, without losing a bunch of screen real-estate to pretty graphics. The widgets look good, but they just waste too much space IMO.

  15. Edwin Khodabakchian

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:21 am

    I have been in the past a skeptic about the numbers they are claiming as well but you have to give them credit for executing well: the service is slick and they are making all the right moves. The key thing for them is whether or not they will find an adwords like business model to monetize all the eye balls.

  16. Gain Traffic For Your Blog Today

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:26 am

    netvibes gets my apparel blog a good amount of traffic!
    ————————-
    http://www.dobizo.com

  17. heri

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:37 am

    as a web developer i applaud netvibes.

  18. Paul Freet

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:39 am

    @webmonkian you might be on to something. I confirmed what you are saying about the userID. If this is true, it clearly is disingenuous to count every person who ever went to your website as a “user”. When you login, you can check a box to “logout on browser close”. Next time I go to netvibes to login, guess what, I’m a new user.

    @whoopee - that was exactly my original experience. But it seems to be much, much quicker now than it was just a few months ago.

  19. Jonathan

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:00 pm

    Whoa..

    when can I get my hands on Coriander?

  20. matthew

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    anybody know what widgets are good for besides rss? i have no use for a clock widget, a calculator widget, or a system admin widget.

  21. datter

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    I am firmly in the “virtually the entire day” camp.

  22. matt

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:55 pm

    10 million users? How come their Alexa chart has been dropping for the past 3 months while their so called active user numbers have gone up by a couple of million? I can only agree with reply #8. Amazing that everyone keeps taking these numbers for granted without asking the obvious questions. Maybe that’s just how the business is played these days. Lot’s of inflated numbers. What happened to fair play?

    Matty

  23. Sean

    February 21st, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    Very, very kick ass. Go netvibes :)

  24. Diego Ferreyra

    February 21st, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    TrackBack: Switching Homepages - I love Netvibes @ http://webwebusability.wordpre.....mepages-i/

  25. G

    February 21st, 2007 at 1:36 pm

    Even compete.com & ranking.websearch.com which tracks mainstream usage better than alexa shows poor stats for netvibes.com.

    The novice surfers i see use yahoo.com or msn.com as their homepage and slightly expirenced surfers set google or something simple like officialhomepage.org or about:blank as their homepage.

  26. Tim

    February 21st, 2007 at 2:16 pm

    “Once launched, any widget created for Netvibes, Krim says, will work on the Vista, Google, Mac and Opera platforms as well.”

    The key words in this quote are “any widgets created for Netvibes…” These “captive” widgets created for Netvibes are, I believe, different from widgets we find “in the wild” (i.e. embed code generated by widget sponsors such as del.icio.us, Flickr, Word of Blog.net, etc).

    What I would like to see is for Netvibes to allow its users the ability to copy/paste widgets (the native embed code) onto their own pages. Basically, offer us a blank html module into which we can paste the embed code and then perhaps give us some customization options.

    Were this feature to be adopted the problem of finding a place to host one’s widgets would be solved (Fred Wilson’s point a while back). As Fred pointed-out, one’s sidebar in a blog is not the ideal place to store one’s widgets. Therefore, we all need a 3rd party platform to act as the host.

    Were these native widgets THEN made exportable through a universal API I believe we would begin to see widgets be more than nice utilities and toys.

  27. Daniel Haran

    February 21st, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    Tim - he said the engine would be released as OSS…

  28. Ivan Pope

    February 21st, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    I’d just like to point out that Universal Widget is a trademark for Snipperoo

  29. Tim Post

    February 21st, 2007 at 5:38 pm

    @Daniel

    The fact that Netvibes will be release the “conversion engine” as OSS still misses my point.

    The Universal Widget API concerns the exporting of widgets from Netvibes to other platforms. It allows for different format to be compatible. However, Netvibes still does not allow folks to import widgets created elsewhere, regardless of format, to be imported into Netvibes.

    Instead, as I understand it (and if I’m wrong please Karim correct me), Netvibes has done partnerships with various widget providers (web services) that enables its users to actually create widgets for those web services inside of Netvibes. The resulting widget for a service like del.icio.us which is created insdie of Netvibes is different than the same widget created at del.icio.us by the same user.

    Why not simply allow Netvibe users to go to the widget “source” and then copy/paste the embed code into a module inside their account?

    The fact that Netvibes is paving the way for a universally accepted standard is great. Kudos to Tariq. However, the irony is that while this new “coriander” conversion engine will indeed enable “….. a world where a widget works on every platform, no matter where it was originally created” Netvibes still won’t allow its users to include widgets created elsewhere in their accounts.

    Tariq, what are your thoughts on this topic? Am I correct? If so, would you be willing to open up Netvibes so that users like me can finally have a place to put our widget collections?

  30. Amy Wilsch

    February 21st, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    W3C cannot even get compliance enough to work in all browsers yet. God I hate HTML. Can’t someone come up with a better solution…..

  31. xxdesmus

    March 6th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    Wow, this is exciting news…I can’t wait to see where this goes.

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