Netvibes May Give My Yahoo Run For Money

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Wall Street Journal columnist Walter S. Mossberg reviews Netvibes, which allows users to create personalized pages with modules that gather headlines, email, weather and other data from all over the Web, and 'combines some of the best features of My Yahoo and [Apple's] Dashboard,' Mossberg writes. More from the article: 'Among the modules you can add to your Netvibes page right from this menu, without navigating to any setup page, are weather forecasts, a notepad, a to-do list and calendar, and modules that perform searches for Web pages, blogs, pictures, videos and podcasts. There are also email modules that will display your new messages from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL Mail or any regular old email account you configure. Others display content from eBay, MySpace, Fox Sports and more.' In an accompanying video, Mossberg demonstrates Netvibes."

Portals are so 1997

Didn't the world move beyond customizable portals with My Netscape? Does anyone actually care about this fluff anymore?

Why hasn't google done something like this?

It strikes me as odd that Google hasn't done something like this already. Personalized Google is OK, but not nearly as user friendly as My Yahoo or Netvibes. It's surprising they lag behind on this.

My Yahoo

I've used my.yahoo.com as my personal homepage for a few years now and I've been pretty happy with it. It loads quickly and has a nice setup interface for adding RSS feeds. I was skeptical at first but quickly won over once I started playing with it.

MSN, Netscape, Google, etc.

Aren't there a huge plethora of sites that allow you to basically collect little applets and RSS feeds for a customized home feed?

Hasn't this been the case for years and years?

Can anyone please explain how this /. worthy?

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Mossberg review + slashdotted = $$$$

Wow, this French startup got a healthy boost today from Slashdot AND Mossberg !!!
Investors, add some $$$ (sorry euros) on your previous checks.

All this Web 2.0 stuff is still very surprising and I am still a bit skeptical. But promised ! I will try it.

Hope that we get the same kind of boost here. (a bit jealous)

Hooray for Privacy

From the Netvibes.com front page: "Gmail Account not configured, use the Edit button to set your login and password".

This site ... isn't a Google service. They want full access to your email? Yeah, right. I can't see how else it would work...

These aren't the only two on the market...

Why wasn't Google's personalised home page included, or the MSN Live pages? Seems to me it's a bit of a redundant comparison.

Similar product

Protopage [protopage.com] is another web 2.0 app that does the same thing as netvibes.

Yahoo Mail Beta

I just tried out the new Yahoo Mail Beta, and I must say it's very nice. It takes some of my favorite features about My Yahoo, and improves the email experience too. The only problems I have with it is that it is a little large and doesn't offer the same customization options as My Yahoo (yet).

I used My Yahoo for awhile, but eventually it just wasn't worth it to me. Now that they have some of the same functionality in the same pane as my email, though, I really like it.

All this to say, I won't be using Netvibes, and Yahoo is probably not in danger of giving up much of this market.

Does anyone know of any opensource products

that allow for the same thing?

I would like to host my own "portal" interally on my network. I would envision this to be a web page which is a collection of feeds and links to other services. Something like my.yahoo.com or personalized google.

all in one?

Just for the same reason I don't buy all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. If one part breaks, the whole thing is worthless. With this, if someone gets one password, they have access to all of your email accounts and whatever else this site has.

My Yahee, My Yahoo

So it might be better than My Yahoo. But is it better than My Yahee [albinoblacksheep.com]?

Netvibes Customization with Firefox...

I wrote this article about how to take customization to the next level with Netvibes and some firefox extensions. Check it out: http://www.pecknology.net/netvibes/index.html [pecknology.net] Cheers, Daniel

Other people's content

Isn't this going to be the same problem as Yahoo showing Wii pictures from flickr on their Wii page [yahoo.com]? (Also see: http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/32752/ [flickr.com] ) If netvibes starts adding advertisements to their page (and they will) they will hopefully get the problems they deserve for layouting other people's content.

How is this better than...

http://www.google.com/ig [google.com] ??

In fact it looks more cluttered and less flexible to me.

Slashvertisement? I think so.

No freaking way this will take off

Google personalized page loads in 1 second. Yahoo takes about the same, maybe a bit longer but is harder to use due to visually noisy design. Windows Live personalized page takes 6 seconds. Net Vibes takes even longer.

The winner is Google, case closed.

NetVibes - not addressing the rreal issue

What is amazing is that NetVibes isn't even original. Microsoft had this interface running in their start.cm site and then in Live.com before NetVibes launched. The real issue for personalized home pages is that they take work to set up AND more and ongoing work to maintain. Most folks set them up and perhaps update once but then stop using them because their interests change.

There is one of these that addresses the problem called PersonalWeb. It watches where you are surfing and figures out what your interests are and then changes what you see based on what you are doing. They make their money putting ads in the pages and one interesting thing is that they customize the ads to also match what you are doing. You get fewer stupid ads and offers and more things that appear are ads for stuff you actually have been shopping or are interested in. Much less annoying.

Netvibes rocks

I've used Netvibes for almost half a year now - really great for keeping up to date with various RSS feeds and bookmarks (due to the del.icio.us support) no matter what machine you're on. The key to having this work is a very clean layout - I've tried both the Yahoo and Google solutions but liked Netvibes much better.

Help the Brim project instead for a OSS one

While netvibes, pageflakes, start.com (did M$ rip them off?), google personalized home pages are all cool, I'd prefer to have my own private version The Brim [brim-project.org] project is a long ways away from that but it has the biggest chance of becoming a OSS version for you to put on your own server.

The Economist on Tariq Krim - Netvibes' founder

semi-interesting...
http://economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story _id=8625931 [economist.com]