Netvibes, original widget homepage, is morphing into something much more interesting. The next version of the service, dubbed Wasabi, is a potent stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and much more in an extremely manageable interface. Wasabi will become available early next week in a private beta, but you can start signing up for it now.
CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.
You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. “Any service that has a stream we can display it,” says Mini.
Rather than scan across 20 boxes, Netvibes users will now have the option to mash everything together and filter simply by what’s been posted most recently. Wasabi has infinite scroll, so you can keep going down until you’ve had enough. There is also a new mosaic view, which shows each item as a visual tile. When you click on a tile, you get an expanded view that allows you to read the item, while keeping a strip of navigational tiles up top (see screenshots below).
On the backend, Netvibes is speeding things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), which also launched at the Realtime CrunchUp, and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.
So Wasabi is not only a potent stream reader, it is faster too. I won’t miss the widget view one bit.
Photo credit: YouTube/FatoosVanRobin.
Would love to use it and get the beta invite and see teh difference between google reader etc
I spied “Beta Invites” in the title of this post but alas I found none in the post itself.
You need to register at http://wasabi.netvibes.com
Thanks!
Copy from another new french website http://waasabi.com/ shame on netvibes.
Honestly? Never heard of it !
If you are a Netvibes user and want to preview a true magazine-like experience, you can get feedly today: http://www.feedly.com (integrates very well with Netvibes).
To my knowledge, Feedly doesn’t have widgets and only manages feeds. You can’t get the weather, facebook, twitter, video, blog, images searches et al.
Wasabi uniquely combines both widgets and feeds in both views. All in one single product. You can get the weather and all your widgets without leaving the Smart Reader view.
I agree Magazine-like layouts are great. We added them to Netvibes at the end of last year http://www.tech...rts-opensocial/
Freddy. Except for weather, feedly has everything else. You should give it a try: you never know you might get converted
And it now runs on Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
Edwin, what is everything else besides RSS? I can see Add Source but how to add webnote, calendar, todo list, ebay, digg, facebook, myspace, stocks, flickr, etc, etc…
Netvibes motivation is to provide a complete Personal Dashboard Publishing Platform. “Personal Dashboard” has to offer everything and every way to monitor everything that matter to you. Hence Widgets and feeds.
“Publishing Platform” to help you publish your Dashboard to others. Your community, audience and work environment.
Register to beta test Wasabi and you might get converted Edwin
Best,
Freddy
You are right: we do not do calendar, webnotes and todo lists. But everything else is just built in.
Regarding publishing, stay tuned: we will have a great gift for you for the holidays.
I do not mean to be disrespectful: Netvibes is a pioneer in the personalized start page and competition is great for the users. Good luck with this release.
Well abundance might be precisely the problem: more information, more real-time feeds.
How long are we supposed to stay glaring at our NetVibes or iGoogle screen when more and more feeds and/or gadgets flood the page with information changing every second?!
That’s really insane. What we need is something like Red Panda (www.rdpnda.com) , that garners even more information but displays it only in context!
Isn’t this like feedly? Think it’ll be good to have a comparison chart with other similar offerings.
As long as feed readers will rely on the “mark as read” paradigm, i will stay clear from them.
I need a feed reader that doesn’t pester me about 1157 unread items, and doesn’t make me hit a button and confirm to get rid of such numbers every time i log in. I need a feed reader that enables me to track precisely a very limited number of feeds (like ten friends’ blogs), and to just dig in a pool of other feed items when i want to without telling me if i’ve read them or not.
On top of that, the “read/unread” metaphor has always been flawed, starting with e-mail. Just because you clicked on an feed item doesn’t mean you’re read anything beyond a few words, and just because you’ve clicked an e-mail subject doesn’t mean you’ve read the whole e-mail—or accomplished the related tasks.
I completely agree. There are many advances to be made in the Inbox range of feed readers and mail applications.
Funny, we’ve announced 10 days ago Webwag easy in our newsletter
Oh, and one last thing, expect something called Webwag Flow, web and mobile, very soon…
Registration for private beta is avaialble here: http://widg.me/EqobF
Hello Florent, how are you doing?
Just noticed that http://www.webwag.com/easy/ seems to be broken at the moment…
Hi, Franck, thanks for pointing it out. Indeed, this is an old address. Corrected.
By the way, interesting to see that netvibes follows webwag so closely, since this address is not public but has been around for a while.
Actually I only found it through Google this afternoon
@edwk – I just downloaded feedly – very very nice, I ‘ll give it a good try.
Thanks Michael. We are listening at @feedly if you run into any issues or have suggestions on how to improve the service.
Dude. At least you should use the picture of the real wasabi.
http://www.cook...ndex.php/Wasabi