Not wanting to be left behind, Netvibes is adding a slew of social-networking features and integration with other social networks to its widget start page. Netvibes already supports a variety of desktop widget platforms, has its own Universal Widget API, and is part of Google’s OpenSocial movement. It is now combining all of these efforts, Tariq Krim announced today at a conference in Berlin (TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher has the details). NetVibes widgets will work with OpenSocial, Facebook, and desktop widget platforms on the PC and Mac.
The next version of Netvibes, codenamed Ginger, will also add a feeds feature called Flow, and a Friends tab so that you can follow your friends’ feeds and widgets as well. Krim explains in an e-mail from Berlin:
We are introducing social features . . . [so you] can share and follow widgets from your
friends or have a private flow to keep up a netvibes history.We will extend netvibes widgets to run natively on opensocial and
facebook. (By the way we are part of opensocial but we will work with
everyone else)We will launch a private beta for our developers in couple weeks.
It’s a big step as we have work to rebuild everything. It like our
leopard
Here is our earlier Netvibes coverage. Here is a demo video of what Ginger will look like:
I thought OpenSocial was positioned as a universal layer across all social networking applications. Here comes another one.
http://webcurrents.wordpress.com
I joke you not, netvibes threatened to sue us last year. If I am lying, please somebody from netvibes come out and tell everyone. We of course did not do what they accused us of and nothing came from it.
Ah the French. oh lala ….. lalalalalala
Wait until they see what we did.
As if we were going to accept a paquet from la France!
Now this is getting confusing…do I use Google’s OpenSocial or go with NetVibes’s API?
The one advantage that you get is that with Netvibes you can create OpenSocial apps where they were not intended: Windows/Mac desktop, Apple iPhone and Yahoo. Until we get the API it will be hard to see what the downsides are.
http://www.opensocializr.com
OpenSocial community for developers and users
Looks like we are in for a widget storm over the next few months across all platforms!
http://www.opensocializr.com
I think it’s great that everyone is jumping on this bandwagon of javascript apis. I hope people get caught up in this for months. and months. There’s only about 30 days left until our release. Netvibes? eh…. I think they’re followers with a budget.
There are so many bandwagons around here, someone’s going to get seriously hurt.
db
Ah!~ I have been using Netvibes for quite sometime now and I love every moment of using it!
You can add so many things on your page and I get to keep track on the latest news on each blog by looking at the feeds…
But then again, I suffer from lag each time I open up my firefox - I set it on open my previous tabs..
It’s pretty slow opening netvibes..
Anyone got the same experience?
Would Ginger performs the same?
Go have a beer Chris and quit pumping posts with your idiotic comments.
Come back when you actually have a functioning and successful offering that backs up all your HOT AIR!
Pageflakes is way ahead in the “social meets personalized page” game…they’re up to something like 140,000 Pagecasts, have social networking, profiles, etc (see TechCrunch article in July, and Erick’s coverage from when he was at Business 2.0).
“Come back when you actually have a functioning and successful offering that backs up all your HOT AIR!”
Yes, go ahead and poke at me through the cage. I am sitting here looking at it. It will be released soon. please resume your poking.
I think I will stick with Pageflakes. I agree with Chandra (#3)… I don’t know what “opensocial” is good for (what does it do for me?). I can share all my stuff with Pageflakes today - check out my Pagecast: http://www.pageflakes.com/e3
What’s the deal with all the widget hype by the way? Seems like I can get widgets everywhere anytime. I am confused.
E.
totally confusing…who really tweaks their info conduits to such a degree? make you want to run for the simplicity of my.yahoo.com.
netvibes is a fun toy but still a toy. by day three of using it, i had gotten tired of watching it take ten seconds to load up crap feeds
a friend intro’d me to netvibes a month ago, and while it takes a spanner to load [ the most irritating aspect of the service ], i think it’s great.
@whoopie i haven’t yet tried my.yahoo.com, so i have little basis for comparison, but i will.
Netvibes is close to perfect. It’s been my start page for about a year now.
I had a bad experience with flaky Javascript at Pagesflakes, and iGoogle is just pure grunge. Netvibes is not lightning fast (try setting it to update tabs one at a time), but it’s rock-solid reliable. And independent. And (ahem) European.
So Tarik, you have a happy Web 2.0 “customer” here. There’s no money in it (yet), but the service is so decent that I’ll think very hard before moving now.
Protopage is fast to load if you think the others are too slow
@7: Yes, I also use Netvibes for everything, but with an opml of over 100 feeds there are some serious performance issues under Firefox, such as huge memory suckage. I’ve done some research that indicates this is an issue with particular javascript implementations, but it has caused me to consider looking elsewhere for my RSS interface.
I agree with the positive side of the social twist from Netvibes but also on the too long uploading time of the service.
Can anyone tell me what on earth “It like our leopard” means?
I am sure Tariq meant “It’s our leopard”
Now inside of our facebook widget (which is inside a netvibes page), we can have a netvibes widget, which has a facebook widget inside of it, which has a netvibes widget inside of it, etc. Infinte nesting, I love it.
it’s just great !