Big Netvibes changes
Posted on April 7, 2006
3 Comments
Netvibes announced some big new changes. Great changes. Today there were three blog entries announcing all sorts of great stuff.
Number one in that category has just got to be tabs. Oh, not just any old run of the mill tabs. These are tabs that you can actually drag and drop stuff on to. Shuffling and reorganizing your “web desktop” just got incredibly simple. Rename ‘em, re-order ‘em, you can even add little icons to them to help visually organize your info. (click the picture to the right to see a bigger image)
RSS reading improvements were part of these changes too. I seem to detect some very nice performance increases going from post to post. Also, my favorite feature:
Please welcome the RSS reader tool tip. Very simple: on any RSS feed module, just fly the cursor over the news headlines and it will display the first lines of the content in an attached box. You can avoid opening the large window and asking for “read all”, and still quickly get an idea of what this is all about. Also very useful for bloggers that tend to limit their titles to a couple of words.
In fact, with the addition of tabs and the RSS reader tweaks, I’m thinking I’ll be switching back from BlogLines. While I like BlogLines, I mainly ended up there so that I could read feeds from any machine, including my PocketPC. Well, after the first month, turns out I don’t read feeds on my PocketPC all that often. So… Granted, I’ve yet to find another reader that could read a blogLines OPML export, and Netvibes isn’t in that category so first I have to talk myself into adding all my feeds from BL to NV. Ugh. I wish the Netvibes opml importer would tell me why it stops. [Update: I stand corrected. The opml import appears to have eventually worked. It must run as a "background" process or something similar]
Hmm… what else? Oh yeah - columns. We can now control, per tab, how many columns to show. And let’s not forget the recent addition of 1GB of box.net storage.
Big stuff and I think the bar has definitely been raised a notch here. Now where’s the BlinkList integration? 
[I swear I had this started before SimpleRich did -- but since I work for a living... *cough* I had just jotted down a few sentences in draft. So yeah, I've been scooped!]
Tags: ajax, BlinkList, bloglines.com, desktop, NetVibes, web2.0
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Just a quick heads up - all the news that NV announced today are laready available on Pageflakes. Of course, so many personal start pages out there that it seems hard to differentiate. Just thought I mention it anyway…
Right Mike. I’ve actually written quite a bit about Pageflakes here in the past. However, Netvibes has the edge with two things right now - full RSS reading (not excerpts) and the ability to drag items to another tab. Those are both huge — to me, at any rate.
That being said, Pageflakes has blinklist integration which I quite like as well.