Solo Technology

Netvibes rolled out phase 2 of the Coriander Release today. It introduces one very cool new feature implemented as an innocuous little button on the feed reader.

See that “Show website” button? At first it doesn’t seem like much of a big deal. But suppose you’ve just read an article and want to comment on it — just click “Show website” and you have a “framed” view of the site and original article. Live! Read other comments that folks might’ve left and add your own without ever leaving your feed reader.

That’s pretty slick.

Oh sure, it seems like 99% of the world uses a tabbed browser and we all know the short cuts to pop a link in a new tab (right?). But this just seems so much more efficient for some reason. Definitely worth playing around with at any rate.

Now if there was a way to more efficiently read lots of feeds with Netvibes… perhaps add a far left pane to the existing feed reader that would allow us to select individual feeds (err, that’d be a lot like Pageflakes I suppose). Maybe I’ve not yet mastered all the keyboard shortcuts with NV, but subscribing to a lot of feeds seems to become a lot of clicking to actually read ‘em.

There are some other enhancements mentioned in the Netvibes blog post, but this is the one that seems the most interesting to me.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it earlier this month: Checkout their Universal Widgets API if you’re into that sort of thing. I haven’t quite digested it yet — not sure if I’m excited or not…

4 Responses to “Netvibes Reader Changes”

1. Lorri on March 19th, 2007 9:54 pm
   

   Hm… bit of a Pageflakes ripoff if you ask me. All those so called new features have been introduced by Pageflakes about 5 months ago. Looks like NV is just copying the most popular ones.

   Lorri

2. Rich G. on March 19th, 2007 10:01 pm
   

   Nicely spotted Handy. I’d been on netvibes a couple times today and only noticed the “suggest” button which may have been there for ages but ignored by me.

   Posting this comment to you from within netvibes window. You’re right, it IS cool.

3. Lorri on March 19th, 2007 10:50 pm
   

   yup, as said before - the same feature has been introduced by pageflakes in their rss reader about 5 months ago. what’s all the fuss about? i don’t get it…

   lorri

4. Chris on March 19th, 2007 11:24 pm
   

   @Rich - nifty eh?

   @Lorri - Thanks for stopping by!
   I wonder how many folks use Pageflakes vs Netvibes? I suppose that’s what the fuss is all about — eyeballs.

   I don’t doubt that Pageflakes has often been ahead of the curve. But netvibes, to me at least, is a bit more “sticky”.

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