For those of you who need more information widgets in your life, Netvibes is adding widget recommendations to its homepage service. It just started rolling this feature out today, and all Netvibes users should see it within the next two or three days. It looks at all of the information widgets on all the pages and tabs in your account, compares that to other members with overlapping taste, and suggests content they have that you don’t.
When users click on the “add content” button on the top left, a “Recommended” option will appear below the widget search box. Clicking on that will generate 12 new widget recommendations across nine categories of interest: news, sports, business, technology, entertainment, shopping, lifestyle, games, and travel. Netvibes is calling this new widget recommendation and distribution feature Talk To Me.
When I tried it, most of the recommendations were for news, since the way I use Netvibes is to scan dozens of blogs and news feeds on a single page. The recommendations, at least for me, were a bit too predictable: WSJ blogs, the Financial Times, The LA Times, CBS News. (Click above for a larger image). These are all things I could have found myself. But the recommendations are suppose dto get better over time, learning from what you add and what you reject.
Netvibes is in the widget business, so it needs to encourage more consumption of widgets. It will also be showing targeted sponsored widgets in the same window, marked accordingly, and it gets paid every time someone installs those widgets on a cost-per-install basis.
I personally have moved on from widgets to more linear streams of data as my information consumption habit of choice, but a lot of people still like widgets (see, iGoogle). Most widgets are really just a different way to package streams of data such as news or Twitter feeds. On Netvibes, you arrange them in boxes on your page, and can organize multiple pages in tabs, and even go beyond that. But at a certain point you stop adding new widgets just like you stop adding new feeds to your RSS reader because you don’t know what else to add or it simply becomes overwhelming. A good recommendation system could help you discover new widgets, but what is equally important is a way to clean up the widgets you added long ago but never bother to look at. Recommending what to get rid of is just as important as recommending what to add. But that is not part of the system yet.
people still use netvibes?
hmmmm… yes i hope. Compete shows some reasonable traffic
http://siteanal...m/netvibes.com/
Note that compete.com only estimates traffic in the US and we moved all our partner traffic (Premium Universes) off “netvibes.com” in March 09.
Netvibes is awesome!
LOL @ widgets galore..funny
Yes Meh, there are people who still use Netvibes, even though I am not one of them. Recommendations is quite an old thing now, But still progress is all that matters! Better Late than Never!
this is a joke
obizy.com Monitoring software and hardware change
I like the idea of removing widgets Erick. What makes TechCrunch so good is that you think for yourselves about how to make products better.
You talk about more linear streams of data but don’t you wish Twitter had channels?
Man I need to download that…
But I like this technology for now…
http://www.yout...h?v=s8Z7BkMAmdE
Interesting idea but adding widgets most of the time slow down the PC.
If you want to remove widget you never read, have a look at netvibes labs, they got a nice feature called ‘netvibes spring cleaning’ which does that:
http://www.netv...s.com/labs/?p=3
In the Netvibes’ labs, there is the ‘Spring cleaning’ project to delete old and unread for a while :
http://www.netv...s.com/labs/?p=3
agree, but i will love to try it!
I don’t use Netvibes. It’s for my mom
for me It’s Tweeter Time .
I do not like net vibes. I found it a little boring. If their was not so many choices they could have been a leader in this sector. Similar to lab pixies. Lab pixies ran the show at one point.
wow ..Netvibes is awesome!