Netvibes is founded in 2005 and headquartered in Paris. In March they released the new version to all registered users: Ginger (previous Coriander). 

With Ginger, you have your private page and your public “universe”. The public universe is a major update. It adds the social function to Netvibes. Now you can Share your feeds, widgets & pages; you can add friends and write them messages. You might be able to do more but I don’t have any friends yet over there so I don’t know. I used the “search friends” function, but no one in my address book seems to have a Netvibes acount. Strange… So I guess it’s time for a decent blogpost about Netvibes. Let me tell you what it’s all about. 

What  is Netvibes?

You can describe Netvibes as your personalized start page that brings together all your favorite online services, applications and feeds. It’s much like its competitors iGoogle, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and My AOL.

The main reason I use it is to read my feeds. Due to Netvibes, I don’t have to check all those blogs and websites I like, to see what’s new.

How can you personalize it?

There are built-in Netvibes modules you can add such as RSS-feed reader, local weather forcast, calendar, bookmarks, notes, todo-list, searches, email (POP3, IMAP4; Gmail, Hotmail, .macMail, Yahoo Mail,…) Podcasts (a built in audio player),…

You can easily find them just by clicking Add Content. You can browser by categories, add essential widgets (the most common ones) or any RSS-feed. You can also add feeds when clicking the feed icon or link on a site using Feedburner, check this screenshot.

To keep all of them organized, you can use tabs. I myself have 8 tabs, more about them later. 

You can drag your content around and move it to another tab (drag it to the tab).

A page can be personalized further with the existing themes or by creating your own theme. You can personalize each tab and each widget. Not only by adding fluffy colors, but by clicking “edit” you can adjust some settings for instance the number of items to display, if you want to open directly on the site or not, if you want to see more details,… . 

Social function

You can share your tabs, feeds, widgets and modules with others individually or via the Netvibes Ecosystem. The Ecosystem is a collection of user submitted modulles/widgets built by usting the Netvibes Universal Widget API (UWA), feeds, podcasts, events, tabs and “universes”. 

You can share your favorite widgets with your friends only or with the rest of the world by staring them. They will appear in your public Activity Timeline. You can also send widgets and pages to your public page. My public page is on netvibes.com/ikkekietje (don’t forget to write a message on my wall ). At the moment, I have 2 tabs. Check them out. 

The other side of the social function is the gathering of all your social services. I made myself a tab called “community stuff” where I can see all of the changes on my Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter at once. No surfing to all the sites and logging in and clicking a million times just to see the changes on my community pages. There are a lot of services who are trying to get all the social stuff on one place (will write a blog post on that soon) but Netvibes really succeeds there.

My Netvibes

I have 8 tabs. The first one is called General. It contains a weather widget, pots-its and the google-widget. Now that one is cool. It has all your google stuff in it: Google Calendar, Mail, Search, Talk, Maps, Notebook, Documents, News, Picasa, Reader (though I don’t seem to get why you should use that within Netvibes), and YouTube. 

Second tab is News. There I keep all my newsfeeds offcourse. The next 2 are my Blog and Feed tabs. I made 2 tabs because I don’t like to scroll on Netvibes and it couldn’t fit 1 page. Number 5 is my Community-stuff tab, as I told you before. 6 is some other stuff about me, like my del.icio.us bookmarks and my last.fm. Next up is the just for fun tab. It has a feed of the ctrl+alt+delete comic, some widgets to control my Nabaztag, the last.fm Top Artists, a Random wikipedia article (you can never have to much knowledge) and some more funny stuff but most importantly: it has a Fish Tank! Fish make me happy.

The last one is my mail tab. I have my mail client at home, but when I’m not on one of my computers, I can check all of my mailboxes at once, just by checking 1 page.. no need to log in with all my mail accounts. It’s easy, it’s quick. 

Why Netvibes. 

I admit, off all (iGoogle, Pageflakes, My Yahoo and My AOL) I only tried iGoogle. I did that after I was using Netvibes for a long time and I really missed Netvibes when using iGoogle. 

Netvibes is highly adjustable, you can move stuff around, pimp your homepage and it has no advertising (and that’s like.. woaw, because ads are everywhere these days; mind there is not even a Netvibes logo on your page) which allows you to have a nice and clean page. 

With Netvibes, you always stay on the same page. An Ajax pane drops from the top whenever you want to add something, so it does not bring you to another page (something I did not like about iGoogle). 

When you delete a widget, Netvibes asks you if you want to delete it or archive it. When you choose to archive, you can always restore it later. 

Every action you take, appears in your private activity. You can add comment on your action. A little note can help you remember why you subscribed to the feed or why you choose to delete or archive something. 

There also is the social function, you have to share everything with your “friends” these days.

And for the mobile people: there is a mobile and iPhone version. (m.netvibes.com)

Netvibes is not a Feedreader, it’s not a site that brings together all your social community stuff, it’s not a place to check all your mail with one click. No, it’s all that combined in one quick and easy service. It sure helped me to reduce the number of tabs in my browser and saves me a lot of time.

I want to test

You can test without creating account on netvibes.com. It’s slightly different though. The add content bar appears on your left, like it did in Coriander. Check my screenshots to see how it’s like when you register. 

More images in the flickr pool.

So, how do you keep track off everything going on on the web and on your communities? Share your ways and your point of view by commenting on this post. 

Have fun,

Sarah