Pros & Cons
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- No ads.
- Public pages possible.
- Lots of integration with other Web apps.
- All major mail supported.
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- Loads slowly at times.
- Some usability oddities in interface.
- Fewer themes than other start pages.
Netvibes Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Linux |
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Business |
| Type: | Personal |
| Type: | Professional |
Netvibes is a darling among the Ajax cognoscenti, and its latest version, code-named Ginger, goes even more Web 2.0. This next-gen start page is currently in beta (it officially launches on February 19), but I got an early look and was pretty impressed. The latest version adds social-networking features, 2GB of Web storage, and an improved customization interface similar to that of
If you plan to use Netvibes on just one computer, you don't need to sign up for anything; a cookie stores your personalization choices. Registering gets you 2GB of free storage space and the ability to sign into the same start page on multiple PCs. When you first navigate to the site, a splash screen briefly displays, and then Netvibes builds your custom page before your eyes, with several content areas expanding downward. The default view is populated with lots of useful widgets: weather info, e-mail wizard, news, and a to-do list.—
Adding widgets
Clicking on the "Add content" button drops down a sleek, black widget-adding interface. Here you'll find groups of Featured and Essential widgets, as well as options to browse all widgets in 16 categories such as News, Business, Sport, and Shopping. You can add RSS, Atom, or RDF feeds. There's also a search box to find widgets in the service's database.
"Featured" widgets display content from major news sources like The New York Times and CBS News, while Essential widgets (other than the basic weather, mail, note, to-do, notes, and search choices) look like a Who's Who of Web 2.0: box.net, Digg, Facebook, flickr, meebo, Twitter, and so on.
You can either drag a widget from the list directly onto your page or click on it for a live preview. When I added a new module, it appeared by default at the bottom of the left column; I had to drag the widgets manually to spread them across the columns evenly and avoid having one very deep column. A helpful option I haven't seen on other Web 2.0 start pages is "Move to top," which gives a widget top billing. A similar, also unique, convenience (activated by simply clicking an Up arrow near the top of the page) lets you collapse all modules, giving you an overview of everything on the page.
As on other current-generation start pages, each widget offers several choices from its top bar: collapse, refresh, e-mail, format, edit, and delete. But other start pages don't offer Netvibes' star icon, which lets you designate favorite module entries, such as favorite articles in a newsfeed module. The action of marking an entry with this star shows up in your private activity stream (see below, under Social-Networking Features), which you can get to from a star icon at the top of every page. I'd prefer an actual organized list of bookmarks, but this is a start.
Netvibes' mail-wizard widget lets you add accounts from AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, .Mac, POP mail, and Yahoo!, although My Yahoo! offers only Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and POP mail previews. Note: If you want to view your Yahoo! Mail in Netvibes, you need to pay Yahoo! for a premium mail account that allows POP access.
You'll find a number of other useful widgets, too. Webnote, much like My Yahoo!'s Note To Self, lets you quickly type anything directly on your start page. Click on the thumbnail or URL that the link widget displays and you'll jump to another place on the Web. The Bookmark widget imports, exports, and tags bookmarks, and the HTML widget displays not only HTML but also any online picture you enter the URL for. Rounding out the widgets are a calendar that syncs with iCal and a clear, simple little to-do list.—
Page design and layout
The choice of only 16 themes makes Netvibes light in page beautification and customization compared with its rivals, which offer dozens. But you can choose from seven wallpapers, use one hosted on Flickr or on any other site, and pick any background shade. Column layout is also limited compared with what My Yahoo! and Pageflakes allow.
To name your Netvibes page, you simply type over the title text. Unlike other start pages where the service's name—for example, "iGoogle,"—appears in browser tabs and the title bar, your custom title, such as "Mikey's Page" appears instead. The number of new entries for all your content modules will display next to your custom title. The number of tabs you can add seems unlimited; I gave up at 35, which is far more than most people need.
Netvibes gets big points for being the only personal portal that displays no branding, and you can even turn off the page title and search bar. You can customize feeds with "more space" and pagination options. My attempt to speed up page loading by choosing to load only the current tab's modules and turning off visual effects didn't have much influence on loading speed, however. Loading content from the various sources is what takes the time, it seems, not these interface niceties.—
The Universal Widget Ecosystem
Widgets coded to Netvibes' Universal Widget API (UWA) open standard work outside of Netvibes—on the Mac OS X dashboard and in My Yahoo!, Opera, Windows Live Spaces, and the Vista sidebar. The platform is being extended to let you run widgets on social-networking sites like Facebook and those that conform to Google's OpenSocial platform. Within Netvibes itself, you can add any UWA-compliant widget using the UWA module, in which you enter the URL for the third-party widget.
You can browse all of these widgets in what Netvibes terms its Ecosystem, where you'll also see a directory of all "universes," or public Netvibes pages. These are mostly from large retailers and publishers like Crutchfield, People, and USA Today, but now that Ginger lets anyone build them that should change. The Ecosystem also houses topic-related tabs you can add to your page, such as webcams of the world, politics, and CoolGames.—
Social-Networking Features
Like any self-respecting Web app, the new Netvibes amps up its social-networking features. Profiles are much richer than in previous versions of the beta. Now you can include your gender, birthday, and location as well as a photo and feeds. You can also add friends by importing them from your various contact lists or find friends to add by searching Netvibes' entire user base. Like Twitter, Netvibes also allows for "Followers"—unrequited Friends (dare I say "stalkers"?).
A major new addition, activity streams, lets you view the "My private activity," "My public activity," and "Friends activity" by clicking on an Activities button. I found that loading these simple Twitter-like message lists took inordinately long, but that may be a beta glitch. Any article you star appears in this activity stream; ditto for your friends' activities. A small calendar lets you show activity for any date in the past.
You can't update your own stream right from the Activity panel, which I find an odd interface choice. Instead, you've got to go to your Profile page to update your status; Netvibes could have taken Twitter's lead here. Unfortunately, it did take Twitter's lead in limiting your status update entry to 150 characters, rendering me unable to relate even what I had for dinner. This limitation seems pointless, given that there's no mobile component to justify it.
At times the service stalled for me, even once when I tried setting up an account with the older Coriander version of Netvibes. And a top FAQ question on the site is "What can I do if my page is stuck on loading under Firefox?" So there are some reliability issues. Also, among the start pages I've tried, Netvibes was among the slowest to load, sometimes taking half a minute. I realize that this time lag is affected by the source of the content, but My Yahoo and iGoogle always loaded much faster with the same number of modules.
Netvibes has a lot going for it: the absence of advertisements, intriguing new social-networking capabilities; integration with Web 2.0 services; storage; and the ability to build a public page. I also applaud the company's universal widget initiative, which will let programmers write code once and run it on many platforms. But slow page loading, an interface that can be confusing, and fewer customization choices keep Netvibes a nose behind Pageflakes and My Yahoo!
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Final Thoughts
Netvibes
This beta of Netvibes (code-named Ginger) spares you ads and brings some intriguing social-networking capabilities such as Web storage, the ability to build a public page, and integration with other Web 2.0 services. But slow page loading, an interface that's less clear than that of Pageflakes, and fewer themes keep it from reaching the top of the class.