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Netvibes May Give My Yahoo Run For Money

Posted by kdawson on from the widgets-on-steroids dept.

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."

14 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. MSN, Netscape, Google, etc. by Enderandrew · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
    1. Re:MSN, Netscape, Google, etc. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This one is much cooler than any I've seen. It uses AJAX, so changing things around doesn't require a setup page (unlike Yahoo or Google). You want something? Grab it from the sidebar and drop it onto the workspace. Do want something? Click the "X" and it's gone. Rearrange? Just drag and drop! You can refresh the individual boxes too. Plus you can make custom boxes that you can publish for other users to use, too. Very Web 2.0.

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      My blog
  2. Great Comment by jomama717 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Loading...

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    while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
  3. Hooray for Privacy by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    --
    Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
    1. Re:Hooray for Privacy by AmberBlackCat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So giving Google full access to your email is better?

    2. Re:Hooray for Privacy by mrbooze · · Score: 2, Insightful

      *Someone* always has full access to your email, unless you maintain your own email servers and exclusively use encryption in all your messages.

      If not Google, then your ISP. Even if you host your own servers your ISP can capture all your mail traffic unless you encrypt it.

  4. Re:Why hasn't google done something like this? by TodMinuit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Most of Googles stuff comes from internal use. Googlers, like most people in the world, probably don't use personalized portals.

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    I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
  5. Re:Why hasn't google done something like this? by Thansal · · Score: 2, Insightful

    hit submit by accident...

    Alot of the stuff in personalized google is the same type of stuff on my yahoo. Sure it might not look as pretty (personaly I think it looks beter), but I find it to be fulyl functional.

    I have up on mine a random game, /., Ruters, a wiki search box, my email, weather, and that is about all I want.

    If I want sometihng else you can just add in the RSS feed.

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    Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
  6. These aren't the only two on the market... by ilovegeorgebush · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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    ilovegeorgebush
  7. Wouldn't the right thing to say be... by neglige · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

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    My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
  8. Other people's content by Ougarou · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't this going to be the same problem as Yahoo showing Wii pictures from flickr on their Wii page? (Also see: http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/32752/ ) 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.

  9. No freaking way this will take off by melted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Does anyone know of any opensource products by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

    You forgot to provide the actually relevant information, which is that if you want to use it to create a site with user-definable portals, you will need the MySite module.

    I've been using drupal for a short while now (since 4.6 - since then there's been 4.7(.x) and now we're up to 5.1 already - drupal's versioning scheme was recently changed to be more stupid) and while there are some dragons there it's easily the most full-featured free CMS that won't make you cry trying to set it up. In fact 5.x made the installation and administration processes substantially easier.

    I'm running two sites on drupal (and soon, I hope, my employer's website, which currently is some homegrown asp/jscript with a mssql backend) and I've been pretty happy in general. There's tons of modules, and most of them even work :)

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  11. Netvibes rocks by Ullteppe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.