Netvibes
I’m a bit late in finding out about Netvibes. (Thanks, fellow Slawyer Louise Tsang.) It’s a Web 2.0 browser desktop, that much like Google’s News effort, is customizable both as to content and layout. But it offers a whole lot more, taking advantage of all of the Web 2.0 stuff that’s out there. As well, it’s a fairly good-looking thing, which helps if you’re gunning to be folks’ home page.
What you see on the left is a list of the functions/objects that by drag and drop you can place on your Netvibes page. I particularly like the iCal function, never being able to remember the URL of my published-to-semiprivate-location calendar, the Writely and Box.net linkups, and the Webnote function.
Not everything is working right: I had trouble importing my bookmarks because the critical button was hiding coyly; and Netvibes acknowledges that the Gmail function isn’t fully operational — Gmail has always been a problem to come at indirectly — but it’s traditional now to release in (early) beta and let users find the bugs. Still, I think this has promise. I can bookmark all of this, of course and put the links on my personal toolbar, so I don’t actually need Netvibes, but I think I might prefer to have the nifty tools I occasionally use displayed graphically along with a bit of content.
Scott Vine (aka the Information Overlord)has a fantastic post which reviews the various ‘personalized homepage’ websites, including screenshots and a comparison chart, available on the web today. Not an exhaustive list, but most of the majors, and a very good read.
Thanks Steven. I’m not usually a big fan of personalized home pages — I use my real desktop by and large — but it’s good (and hard!) to keep up with Web 2.0. I mean just look at the 360 “winners” in John Davis’s post above.
Thanks, Simon! This looks interesting.
Let’s make a new rule: never apologize for being slow to hear about something. Sure as shootin’, there are plenty of the rest of us who haven’t heard about it yet either! 8-)