netvibes – procrastination central

Netvibes at Wikipedia
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Remember the bad old days of early internet where the tech-savvy among us would create themselves a home page filled with links to their favourite sites? Well, over the last few years this concept has begun to gain some technical accreditation, and in doing so made itself available to the masses. I’m talking about services like iGoogle, and one I recently discovered, Netvibes.

While iGoogle comes with all the news and e-mail you could possibly ask for, it doesn’t have the same comprehensive database of information offered by the more aesthetically pleasing Netvibes service. Netvibes, I’ve so far found, is quite cool. It’s fully “Web 2.0″ and allows you to add pre-built or your own widgets to your home page, while also allowing full customisation in terms of tabbed content browsing, the ability to place items almost wherever you want, and to arrange them in whatever kind of order or categories you desire.

They boast 100,000+ pre-built widgets including monitoring of all major webmail services, news, personal sites, bidding, anything you can think of really. For any site that doesn’t already have its own widget, you can create your own using an RSS feed. I personally find the MySpace and eBay widgets quite useful; without having to go to either site in-full and login, I can just go to my netvibes private page and see everything I need to see.

That’s another interesting feature, supposedly designed for sharing and collaboration (and perhaps competition with the aforementioned MySpace et al); you have yourself a private page full of things you want to keep tabs on, but you also have a “my universe” page which is a publicly viewable version of your stuff. You can add friends, join groups and all that good stuff we’ve come to love from MySpace, Facebook and Beebo.

Whether or not the netvibes portal is going to serve me with any great useful purpose I’m yet to determine, but for now I can appreciate it as a cool toy, as I’m sure many other netizens will appreciate.

You can view my public page here. Happy vibes!