We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”

As we wrote earlier, Netvibes 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. Plus, Wasabi has also sped 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) and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

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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.

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Its new Premium Dashboards product gives publishers the ability to push out new content and site changes, while at the same time giving users on the other end some control over what they want to see from these changes. Regular Dashboard members will be told that there are new updates available (just as you would be with your computer operating system) and are asked to update. But Premium Dashboard members can pick and choose which updates to accept or reject.

This seems like a smart play from both Netvibes and its publishers perspective because most users are probably going to choose to accept whatever changes are being pushed towards them. But at the same time, they’ll know in the back of their minds that they do have a choice not to, which is always reassuring. And this whole process maintains the simplicity that leads publishers to choose Netvibes in the first place.

I also like that the demo they sent us is using Chromium for Mac, which is of course, the unreleased and unfinished Mac version of Google Chrome. Ballsy.

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I find myself relying on traditional feed readers less and less these days (stream readers like TweetDeck and Seesmic have replaced them as an hourly habit). But when I do look at my feeds, I like to look at them through Feedly, which presents the stories in a visually appealing, magazine-like layout. Feedly is a Firefox plug-in that lets you import all of your blog and news feeds from Google Reader (or from your bookmarks, Netvibes, or Bloglines).

Today it will be releasing Feedly Explore, the latest version of its reader. The main new feature is an explore page which helps people discover new blogs to read by highlighting celebrity reading lists, staff picks, and sources based on popular tags.

You can also put in your own search term, and Feedly will deliver the most recent results from both your sources and other blogs, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, and Crunchbase. It also searches your Twitter and FriendFeed streams.

For any topic you search for, it also provides a list of “featured sources” which are the most authoritative blogs on the subject. And if you do a search from the new Explore page, you get a preview of the feed for each of the top sources, ranked by number of subscribers. It also tells you how many articles a week come out on that particular feed and how many recommendations it has. Any feed can be subscribed to with one click from within Feedly, of course.

The new discovery features are an added bonus, but the big draw for me remains the visual layout and Feedly’s ability to assemble it on the fly. It just makes the news easier to scan. Netvibes is doing similar things with turning feeds into something you actually want to read. The next step I’d like to see is some sort of alert, a glowing red button maybe, indicating different levels of hotness based on the attention any given story is getting both within these readers and elsewhere.

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NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out a new feature today that lets users create personalized widget-based web pages. NetVibes’s tool, called Theme Publishing, is a visual design editor that lets users personalize and edit every part of their page’s’ theme, from images to background.

The layout of the editing tool is fairly simple. Users “click and pick” on the page:, meaning they click which part they want to edit and pick options from a color palette and design option menus. NetVibes offers a directory of themes or you can create your own theme. You can also publish your theme to the gallery for other NetVibes members to use. Every change is shown live in a preview pane, making it easy to see how a particular design will look. Plus, users can add widgets, feeds, social networks and more to their pages. The bonus: it’s all free.

While the new feature is sure to attract users, it is also likely to attract the attention of brands. NetVibes says that ad agencies, including Ogilvy and Razorfish, are already using NetVibes’ theme design tool to create interactive, uber-personalized microsites for clients that are branded and contain customized widgets for social networks and feeds. NetVibes is also offering a new XML-based Theme API, which will enable web designers to create animated themes on their pages.

The startup recently launched “drag and follow” widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, making it easy to create custom widgets around followers or feeds. Although NetVibes was a pioneer in personalized widget homepages, it has since been overshadowed by iGoogle. At TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream CrunchUp in July, Netvibes previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future.

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NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out helpful “drag and follow” widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter tomorrow.

NetVibes has offered Facebook, MySpace and Twitter widgets for some time now. Once you insert the respective widgets onto your NetVibes homepage, now you will be able to click on any friend, screen name or hashtag in the widget, then drag it outside and drop it on your page to create a new custom widget. The new widget will follow a person or topic. For example, you can take the stream of a news source or friend from Twitter and create a separate widget that tracks only their stream.

It’s certainly useful to navigate many different streams or threads at once. Especially if you are an active MySpace, Facebook or Twitter user, you can aggregate all the feeds onto one page as well as break out the feeds and searches that are most compelling to you, much like you can with many desktop Twitter clients..

Desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, for instance, let you create breakout columns to filter feeds by user and search from Twitter. So if you regularly use a Twitter client, NetVibes’ page may be redundant. But the nice thing about the widgets are that they are small, and you can aggregate other info, like the weather, news feeds, RSS feeds and more onto one centralized page. NetVibes says that they will start using the drag and drop technology for search within other widgets in the near future. Competitors to NetVibes include Pageflakes and iGoogle. Last week at the TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream CrunchUp, Netvibes also previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future.

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I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it.

While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways.

Google engineers Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin will show a demo of a new push protocol called pubsubhubbub, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini will demo his similar RSS Instant Update Hub, and WordPress engineer Andy Skelton will show off a Jabber client which uses the XMPP protocol to push blog headlines into an IM-like environment faster than RSS.

The pubsubhubbub and Netvibes technologies create RSS hubs, which push out feeds as soon as they are available. This approach is in contrast to the polling method which is the foundation of RSS. The polling method sucks because it requires the server acting on behalf of the RSS subscriber to constantly ping the server where the RSS feed is published to ask if there is anything new yet. Depending on how often this happens, you end up with a lag. As communications become more real-time, this lag is becoming more noticeable.

The way pubsubhubbub fixes this is by putting an RSS Hub in the middle which more efficiently pushes out the feeds to the servers subscribing to them. It is an open protocol and can be applied to any existing RSS or Atom feed, as well as other real time streams. If you think about the Twitter firehose that everyone wants access to, this approach lets anyone create their own firehose for different types of data streams. It is more of a federated approach. You can think of these RSS Hubs as a content delivery network of sorts for RSS feeds, similar in concept to what Akamai does for video streams.

Netvibes is creating its own proprietary version of this for its own service, which it is developing independently. It is called the RSS Instant Update Hub. All of those widgets on your Netvibes page today take forever to load because they each have to fetch the underlying feeds of data. The Instant Update Hub will cache and push these feeds automatically so that the widgets load faster and they update continuously without requiring a refresh. Any data stream that is supported by a Netvibes widget today, which goes well beyond RSS, will be pushed through the Instant Update Hub. It will also form the basis for a new stream reader which Netvibes will introduce later this year as an alternative to its current widget grid and magazine-style layouts (see screenshot below).

The WordPress Jabber client uses a different push technology, XMPP, to speed up RSS. The effect is that headlines pop up like instant messages. Jabber is mostly used for IM clients such as Gtalk, but Wordpress is using it as a feed reader and micro-blog publisher. The great thing about it is that it is two-way. In the demo, Skelton will show how the Jabber client can be used as an interface to to post directly to your blog. Feed reading and blog posting can all be done from the same place in a more real-time fashion. The Jabber client can also be used as a blog commenting system and embedded as a widget directly into a Web page, turning comments into more of a chat room.

What we are seeing is the world’s of publishing and IM colliding. The faster we can close the loop between publish and response, the more we are going to see real-time data streams take on the look and feel of public IM systems. Twitter is asynchronous, but it often feels immediate with back and forth conversations sometimes happening almost fast as a private IM chats. That is just a taste of things to come, as all publishing platforms get up to speed.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

Here’s the video from PubSubHub’s demo at the Real-Time event:

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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.

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The feature, dubbed MyAlltop, lets users create a custom page with a so-called vanity URL (e.g. my.alltop.com/techcrunch) where they can add feeds from a variety of topics and display all the widgets on one page, which can then be shared with others. All users need to do is register and add feeds to their public pages by clicking a small plus sign displayed next to feed widgets.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc. have been around for years, and they pretty much all offer the above and much more. MyAlltop only lets you grab feeds that are already on Alltop, so no custom widgets for you (tough luck if you wanted to insert your mom’s blog). Furthermore, Alltop doesn’t have a decent search function, which makes it very hard to look for sources to add unless I’m 100% certain they will be in a specific category. With 31,000 sources in 550 topics, they’re hurting themselves not to make search a priority instead of launching new features like MyAlltop.

For example, I can’t find our sister site MobileCrunch anywhere on Alltop (not even in the Mobile category), so that pretty much blocks me from creating a public TechCrunch presence on Alltop with all our feeds in it. All I could do at this point is notify Alltop that there’s a great resource on all things mobile missing in the pre-defined category list of feeds and hope that they add it. Personalization it ain’t.

You could of course claim that Alltop takes the hassle out of having to locate the RSS feeds of your favorite sources and go through a few steps in order to add them to any personalized feed reader, but how much of a problem is this really? I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim MyAlltop simplifies creating a custom feed reader because it already has been dead simple for many years. In my opinion, anyone who thinks the process of personalizing your RSS feed reading experience with Netvibes or iGoogle is cumbersome will probably feel the same way after trying MyAlltop.

Here’s a video about Alltop (the new feature is explained a bit in the end):

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Netvibes founder Tariq Krim sent me a new screenshot of Jolicloud, the Linux-based Netbook-optimized operating system he’s building (we first covered Jolicloud last December).

The screen shot, which is significantly evolved from what we saw in Paris, shows a set of featured applications that mixes desktop and cloud software – Facebook, Skype, Meebo and Youtube, among others, are shown with large icons that make it easier on Netbook users, who have to make do with smallish screens.

Jolicloud will eventually support touchscreens, Krim told me. We’re trying to get a copy and install it on our CrunchPad prototype to see how it does, and share video.

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The widget is ready for its closeup. Today at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Netvibes announced a major step forward in how widgets are presented on a start page. Instead of the standard jumble of boxes filled mostly with text-only feeds, Netvibes members can now arrange the different widgets they subscribe to in different layouts that help to break up the page. And within a given widget, they can choose different viewing options for how they see each feed, including carousel view, magazine, streaming ticker, and normal text-headline views.

Maybe I’m just excited about this because I’m a former magazine guy, but I always thought Netvibes and most other start pages were way too ugly. The problem with start pages, visually, is that once you add more than a dozen or so feeds, all the boxes meld together and it becomes difficult to see at a glance what has changed. Simply changing the layout to emphasize more important feeds, and then tweaking the look of adjacent widget boxes, makes it much more pleasurable to read.

Netvibes is not alone in thinking about how to present collections of widgets in a more graphic way. In October, Google added its wide, canvas view to iGoogle gadgets. Just because information is coming from different sources doesn’t mean that it cannot benefit from a well designed layout.

To change the layout of an entire page within Netvibes, you click on the option pull-down menu arrow on each tab and pick your layout. To change the layout of an individual widget, you click on “edit” within that widget, and then pick the view you want. (You can read more details on this Netvibes blog post). Netvibes pulls images from the feeds as well, although they tend to be a little fuzzy.

And a year after promising to do so, Netvibes is now finally supporting OpenSocial. Any widget created with its Universal Widget API can be turned into an an OpenSocial app. The developer sandbox to test OpenSocial apps will be here. (Last month, Netvibes implemented Facebook Connect features that lets users share any feed item, widget, or tab with friends on Facebook, or on Twitter as well).

The two (silent) videos below show the new tab and widget layout options and how they look:

Netvibes : Flexible Layout from Netvibes on Vimeo.

Netvibes : Feed views from Netvibes on Vimeo.

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Netvibes, the site that lets users customize their homepages with a variety of widgets, has partnered with Rambler.ru to bring its widgets to the massive Russian web portal. Rambler is the Yahoo of Russia, with an estimated 40 million users and 3 billion monthly pageviews. The deal is being described as “multi-year” and worth “multi-millions”, but further details haven’t been disclosed. Netvibes availability on Rambler.ru is expected to begin in November.

This marks the first time Netvibes has licensed its platform for installation and distribution to an independent third party, and probably won’t be the last. In order to stay competitive with other widget hubs like iGoogle, Netvibes would do well to spur its growth by offering its widgets to other region-specific portals (that said, Netvibes has been doing well, with a reported 500 million widgets served montly). According to the press release, the Rambler homepage will include Google Search, Blinx video search, and a number of Russian services like Price.ru.

In July Google acquired Begun, a contextual ad service, from parent company Rambler. As part of the $140 million deal, Rambler has been using Google for some of its advertising and search functions.

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If Netvibes is getting old and you’re tired of looking at your desktop to find all your favorite apps, Schmedley might be a worthwhile alternative.

Leading up to its public beta next week, Schmedley is offering 5,000 private beta invites for TechCrunch readers who want to take the site for a spin. The premise is simple: you sign up and get brought to your start page, which can be littered with well-designed widgets that let you search Google and Yahoo at the same time, check up on your Twitter feed, work with Facebook, check your stocks, and much more, without surfing to the respective sites.

Schmedley offers a full range of widgets to add to your page and each can be expanded or removed with a click of the mouse. The design is quite appealing and the general uniformity of the widget designs improves the experience, but considering the popularity of Netvibes, it’ll be interesting to see how Schmedley can compete.

If you want to try Schmedley out, click here. If not, you won’t have to wait long before its public beta: it starts on October 1.

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It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it.

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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.

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Despite its easy of use and appealing UI, Pageflakes never really took off. ComScore measured only 50,000 unique U.S. visitors in March, compared to 1.4 million for competitor Netvibes. (And 191,000 uniques worldwide in February, versus 2.4 million for Netvibes). iGoogle had 7.4 million U.S. visitors in March, and My Yahoo had 19 million. But Cohen, who used to run My Yahoo, argues that the difference has more to do with distribution deals than organic growth and that linking up with Live Universe will give Pageflakes the distribution it needs. Says Cohen:

A lot of the growth in the personalized start page category has historically been kickstarted and is still derived from internal and external distribution deals, not organic or viral growth. The original My Yahoo of ten years ago received an incredible amount of traffic from the main Yahoo.com portal (and it still does), and the same went for iGoogle when it launched in 2005 – that little “iGoogle” link in the upper right hand corner of the standard Google.com page was the engine that drove (and continues to drive) traffic to the site.

Comscore shows that even our friends at Netvibes derive most of their current traffic from one deal, the my.alot.com white-label page they did with MIVA, and didn’t experience any growth until that deal occurred last fall. In short, to really thrive in this category, you need big distribution deals with generous revenue share percentages.

I do think that the number of traditional personalized start pages that can co-exist as standalone sites (not affiliated with a distribution network) is pretty small.

In other words, maybe he should have stayed at Yahoo—or Google (where he also worked briefly). The other thing you’ve got to wonder is: What will the half-life of start pages be in a Friendfeed world?

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About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space – MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined – 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are.

One thing to note on the data – it does not take into account duplications (where a user visits multiple of these sites, they are counted as users of all of the sites), so the numbers are really only to show relative size).

Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old.

A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a lot of users on their site. It’s going to be a long haul.

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As is often the case though, when an idea becomes popular enough, the barrier to entry often decreases as at first people try to design their own versions, then later you can buy a script that does the same thing. This auction on Sitepoint is offering an “Ajax DeskTop StartPage Enterprise website (like PageFlakes, Netvibes & iGoogle! )” with a starting price of $90. You can test the service youself at Mevou.com.

So what does $90 buy? It’s not as polished as the existing players, but it’s usable. Customizable widgets are offered next to theme and wallpaper support and page customization options. Except for a lack of depth in the widget offering, the experience in using this script wasn’t that much different from similar sites.

I’m not qualified to say that $90 is cheap for the script (it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be found elsewhere for less) but one thing is certain: here comes the personalized desktop page clone army.

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Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.

The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).

Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.

PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.

PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.

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Netvibes is a customizable start page that lets you add any RSS feed, as well as other apps in the form of widgets that you can drag around the page and place anywhere you want. With Ginger, Netvibes has a new Ajax user-interface that pops down a pane from the top whenever you want to add new widgets to your personlaized start page. It also now lets anyone create their own public “Netvibes Universe” page (before, these were just pages for brands). You can star items in any feed as a bookmarking feature, and there is now an activity stream so you can see what your friends are publicly starring and sharing as well. There is still no internal messaging system, however.

I spoke with CEO Tariq Krim, who took me through the new features by phone from Paris. Overall, Ginger makes the Netvibes experience a lot smoother and finding widgets to add to your start page couldn’t be simpler (even though there are 110,000 widgets to choose from). The problem with Netvibes is that if you don’t get into the habit of going there as your start page first thing when you log on in the morning, you are liable to skip it altogether. I asked Krim when he will turn his widgets into Facebook or OpenSocial apps. That way, people could bring the widgets to where they already go to organize the Web for themselves, if that place does not happen to be Netvibes.

Krim is working on this portability. Netvibes is part of OpenSocial and he’s had Bebo-like discussions with Facebook. “Both consortia would like us to be exclusive on their technology,” he sighs. (Sounds like the platform war is in full swing). Krim says he wants to work with both OpenSocial and Facebook. Ultimately,he doesn’t care where you consume his widgets. By the end of the first quarter, he plans on introducing widget ads in the form of micro-banners and text ads. The problem with widget ads, though, is that there are no standards.

“We need the equivalent of OpenSocial for advertising,” he laments. If only everyone could agree on how to make money, the widget economy might actually come into existence.

Update (Michael Arrington): Tariq Krim gave me a brief overview of Ginger this morning, see video below.

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This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 was first added to the list last year. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. They have taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. over the last two years. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon’s new music store is just about perfect. With the addition of Warner Music they’ve got 3 million DRM-free songs at prices lower than Apple’s iTunes store (which has only 2 million DRM-free songs). It’s not as cheap as AllOfMP3 was, but at least it’s guilt-free and legal. Plus, it will hopefully drive Apple to improve iTunes (offering no-DRM only search would be a good start).

Amie Street

I have been a huge fan of Amie Street since it launched in mid 2006. They sell songs from unknown artists at variable prices. Every song starts at free, and as more downloads occur the price rises, up to a cap of $.99. Amazon likes the model, too. They invested in Amie Street in August.

Delicious

Delicious was on my list in 2006, but last year I switched to Blue Dot for bookmarking and tagging web pages because it had a semi-private feature that allowed sharing just with friends. This year I’m back with Delicious. They finally got Firefox integration just right, and the new user interface, previewed in September, is a big improvement.

Digg

Digg. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. But it’s an important source of traffic for us, and a great place to find interesting stories. I added it to the list last year, and it stay’s for another year. Competitor Reddit is another favorite source of news, though, and newcomer Mixx is coming on strong too.

Facebook

Just over a year ago I joined Facebook, and it is now a part of my daily routine to check up on what friends are up to, test a couple of new Facebook applications, and just generally be a part of the community. A year ago they were a hot startup, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how much they were to grow (in size and mindshare) in 2007. They constantly push the boundaries – and no one can say they’re boring. Facebook is the only pure social network I actually use regularly.

Firefox

The Firefox browser is being added to my list for 2008. If it seems like I’m a little late to the party, realize that Firefox on a Mac was essentially unusable until Firefox 3 came out (still in beta). Until recently Flock was my Browser of choice. Now, it’s Firefox.

Flickr

Flickr has been on the list all three years. It’s still the place I put all of my photos online. Someday perhaps Facebook could become the repository for my pictures. But since all my photos are already at Flickr, inertia keeps me there. Hopefully someday the two services will talk to each other more effectively. There should just be one place in the cloud for photos, and all my social networks should access them there.

Gmail

At the end of 2006 I already thought Gmail was close to perfect. This year they added IMAP support, which was the final piece of the puzzle. I still don’t like the way Gmail groups email threads, and tagging could be improved. But it’s an excellent service and just barely edges out Yahoo Mail as my favorite mail application.

Google Reader

Two years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Last year I switched to NetNewsWire. But Google Reader is just too good to ignore any longer. It’s quite simply the most elegant and useful feed reader available today. The product actually first launched in October 2005 but had serious flaws. But it got steadily better over time. Recent privacy hiccups aside, Google Reader is a beautiful web application and an amazing way to digest tons of information effectively.

Netvibes

Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle and My Yahoo are all excellent ways to organize lots of important data sources into a single home page. I’ve been using Netvibes since 2005 and I’ve stuck with it out of inertia more than anything else. Any of these products are perfect for your home page. If you aren’t using one yet, try them out. My Yahoo doesn’t work with Firefox 3 for some reason, though. Hopefully they’ll fix that asap.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list for three years running, and I expect it will stay there for the near future. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype. It would be very nice if they opened up the API and allowed other applications to use the back end Skype service for IM and calls without opening up the Skype client though. MySpace seems to be the first to crack the nut. Hopefully others will follow, or else Gizmo will someday take their spot.

Techmeme

TechMeme is another three-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I probably generate more daily page views at TechMeme than any other website. It’s amazing that this is still a one man (Gabe Rivera), bootstrapped startup.

Technorati

Technorati was on my list in 2006, and off last year because, frankly, it was just too slow to be useful. But over the last year they’ve refocused and made improvements to the core service, and I’ve started using it again for basic blog search. It’s back on my list of top apps.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

I don’t know exactly how to describe Twitter. For people like me it’s a microblogging platform that allows me to push small bits of information – opinions, links, updates – to people who are interested. It’s become a part of my everyday life, and a great way to stay up to date on what friends are up to.

Wordpress

It would be hard to underestimate how much Wordpress makes my life easier. It is the blogging platform that runs all of the TechCrunch network sites, and has been on the list all three years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

YouTube

YouTube was also on the list last year, and it’s grown exponentially since then. I use it for entertainment (nothing good on TV? There’s always something good on YouTube) and work (we post most of our videos there and embed them here on TechCrunch). Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, particularly the spreadsheet application, has become an important productivity tool for us here at TechCrunch. We used it extensively to organize and discuss the hundreds of startups that applied to launch at TechCrunch40 last Fall. Whenever I open Office on my desktop to edit a spreadsheet, I feel the lack of collaborative features keenly. Frankly, Google Docs is just as useful, although Zoho was quicker to launch offline functionality, which gave them the edge on my list. Either product suite is a huge improvement on basic desktop office software.

Almost on the List

Even though I expanded the list this year from fifteen to nineteen companies, there are a bunch of products that could still be added. In the time wasting category there is Duels and KDice. Skreemr is a great music search engine. We also use Docstoc and Scribd all the time to embed documents into posts. I look up traffic stats for startups on Compete daily. And even though I dropped them from the list this year, I still listen to music on Pandora all the time. I have an idea that 23andMe will be on the list next year, after I’ve gotten back the initial DNA results. Finally, Seesmic would almost certainly be on the list, but I left them off because I’m an investor.

And I haven’t even brought up the gadgets that I use every day. The iPhone, the Philips MP3 alarm clock, my Jawbone bluetooth headset. Maybe next year I’ll break out a separate list for gadgets.

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While you can get all the technical improvements from Yahoo’s own upcoming announcement. The highlights are support for Flash and HTML and the addition of some new partners. Flash and HTML support mean that widget development won’t only be more familiar to web developers, but also more easily support new applications such as video.

Yahoo is also following through on some previous partnership announcements, making Netvibes UWA available as desktop widgets as well as adding the widgets from widget analytics services Clearspring and MuseStorm.

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New York based global Grind launches this morning with some serious backing, a venture round (size undisclosed) from Accel Partners and Russell Simmons.

The service is essentially the same as Pageflakes, Netvibes and other customizable Ajax home pages.

Users set initial interests (video, comedy, news, etc.) and get a set of pre-made modules. You can also add feed URLs directly, create multiple tabs, etc. All standard stuff, even if Global Grind has slightly edgier design than the others.

A lot of the pre-made content is directly related to Hip Hop, though, such as one that shows the most recent beefs between rap artists (just like blogger wars apparently, plus money, sex and guns – see image to right). Users can also make tabs public and share content.

The company was founded by Navarrow Wright, formerly the CTO of Black Entertainment Television. The company has twelve employees.

So…will it work or will it drown in the competition? Frankly, I’m in favor of any experiments which bring technology to people beyond the early adopter tech geek crowd. The Global Grind user base is already tech savvy, though, and aware of a lot of the new web products out there. That means they have to be cool and edgy enough to attract and keep users who wouldn’t think of using, say, Netvibes. Having Russel Simmons involved will certainly help in that area. We’ll check back in on them in six months or so and see how things are going.

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The already minimalized Netvibes is pared down even further for the iPhone to a single column of widgets. There are few graphics to speed load time.

I use Netvibes as a quick hit RSS reader for my most important feeds. It does an even better job on the iPhone and I plan to bookmark a special Netvibes page with the 15 feeds I read multiple times per day.

Keep a lookout on the Facebook blog this evening, too. Facebook PR says they will be announcing the iPhone version of the site shortly. Update: It’s launched.

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I could install it but it won’t pull data from Facebook. Two of our interns were able to get it to work. Let us know if it works smoothly, or not, for you.

What would be awesome is if Facebook (or a third party using the Facebook API) created a general widget to post this type of information on any website.

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