Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.
Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.
Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.
While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.
Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.
Having popularity rating in Netvibes definitely makes sense. If that really compares to what Digg does in terms of community driven content is questionable.
Has Google Analytics been messing up for anyone else today? Mine is just giving me different and inaccurate numbers all day. (sometimes higher and sometimes lower than what it previously reported every couple of hours… very strange)
Looks pretty useless to me if Digg is around.
We need competition to keep the Digg guys on their toes.
That is a very engadgety title.
Calley, are you new to TC?
Isn’t that what Yahoo is calling there voting system. How does netvibes not know this. very random
@ #2
How about sending a tech request to google, instead of getting WAYYYYY of topic.
Think before you type
There is a new Widget on Netvibes called samfind that looks much more useful:
http://altsearchengines.com/20.....-use-handy
buzz.yahoo.com
sounds fishy.
sue. sue. sue.
err..
I mean..
acquire. acquire. acquire.
@3, I echo your sentiment.
In what ways exactly does Netvibes “lag behind iGoogle, My Yahoo!…”?
Interesting article but could be WAY more fluid and on topic. Agreed? I’m sure calley will come back with a winner. Check it… http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
@John Traffic ! but technology is far better, no brainer.
@12
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
What does this have to do with anything?
One month ago and few days before his departure as CEO, Tariq showed me this feature. He was so proud of it and thanks several times his team for the job on this app.
About this buzz application for me is just a gold mine for all the Editors in the world. They can use it as a sniffer for tendances and use the results to create contents around that.
this would be great if starring things shared stories with more than just the netvibes community…I prefer sharing stories through Delicious, much easier, and you don’t have to subscribe to a feed and then star it to let everyone know it.
jeff: You don’t have to subscribe to feeds to share items. There are different tools to share any link on Netvibes:
http://eco.netvibes.com/tools/firefox - Firefox extension with a Star button
http://netviber.blogspot.com/2.....vibes.html - Bookmarklets for sharing your activity, for starring (with some small modification you can embed it into your blog as well to let your visitors star your blog entries).
for another interesting approach to determining buzz, you should also check out polymeme.com, which launched yesterday. it crawls “communities” of blogs — economics blogs, law blogs, books blogs — to apply a Techmeme-like mechanism to determine what’s important/who’s talking about it
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