Tools We Use: Netvibes.com
- October 18th, 2006 /
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Business 2.0 recently profiled Netvibes as a Disruptor and guess who they are shaking up… Google and Yahoo. Now, this claim may be a little early, but we’ve both been using Netvibes here in this office for a a few weeks and its become an indispensable tool for us.
Netvibes basically is a customizable homepage that takes current Web 2.0 design principles and technology to reinvent the homepage. I’ve been using the MyYahoo as my homepage for the last few years, and the truth is as so many other technologies have been moving forward, My Yahoo has been getting a little creaky. Especially as I’ve added the 100 or so RSS feeds that I try to keep up with every day from blogs I’m reading, Netvibes is coming along at just the right time.
What we like about Netvibes:
- Intelligent RSS feed adding – you just enter the blog URL, Netvibes is smart enough to guess/find the RSS feed. This is going to make RSS syndication a lot more accessible for people who are new to this technology and easier for us.
- Ajax functionality for everything – want to divide your feeds into different tabs, move the feeds around on the page, open a post in the window and not go to the blog, its all packed in there. Netvibes has created their software around the user experience and how people will be using their site.
- We use it – This is not just a Web 2.0 company you read about on TechCrunch and use for a few weeks because its the hip company du jour, we actually use it and are sticking with it. Once you upgrade your technology, you’re not going back and this is why Business 2.0 profiled Netvibes as a disruptor.
What we don’t like:
- Its a memory/bandwidth hog – I’ve got over 100 feeds loaded in Netvibes, so maybe I’m stretching it, but when I have it open, everything else slows down. It seems to refresh every feed everytime I reload the page, which I think probably is what takes so much bandwidth. It would be nice to have a setting where we could reload feeds every hour or two rather than on every page refresh. Not sure if this is technically possible, but its my one gripe right now.
I had the pleasure of meeting Tariq Krim at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Fransisco last month. He and the rest of the Netvibes team were clearly the hot company of the show from a VC perspective. We appreciated Tariq’s as an early supporter of Huckabuck.com, and we are excited to see these disruptors headed for success.
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Oct 18, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Hey Chris,
Did I know you at Rosslyn? My memory is so foggy… I’ve been using Netvibes for a while and have found it refreshing – I’ve used email RSS clients, “fat” desktop clients (RSS Bandit), and web based ones in addition to writing my own and feel like it’s a good fit.
The memory issue is a big one and I’ve always wondered why no one has thought of building a destkop client that reads like a newspaper the way that Netvibes does (and supports offline reading). They could also enhance the experience of adding feeds. I showed my wife how blogger blogs have a “magical” (but unlinked – what’s up with that) file at http://foo.blogspot.com/rss.xml where the blog name is foo and that she could copy/paste these into Netvibes – a pain to configure but a timesaver in the end – but anyway, that whole referencing the xml file and pasting it into netvibes seems to be a technical obstacle that could be a making point for any RSS aggregator out there.
Nice to see you out here and you’re now officially aggregated on my end.
Oct 21, 2006 at 3:29 pm
As an aside (if you do read your comments), check out pageflakes at: http://www.pageflakes.com/
Interesting experience to compare with NetVibes.
Oct 24, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Hi David –
That’s really neat that we were at Rosslyn at the same time. I left after 2nd grade, when we moved to the states, so I’m not sure if we overlap.
I checked out pageflakes. Seems very similar. Do you think they’ve got a different approach as far as bandwidth?
Thanks for picking up our feed. Keep in touch
Chris