What is Netvibes ?

Today I want to reviews a cool website known as Netvibes. Actually I was waiting for this post for a while, this is my favourite service out of all. It also belongs to second generation web (web 2.0) products, like Flickr and Delicious that we have profiled before.

So what can you do with Netvibes ?

It lets users createall-in-one online start page (not a personal profile page) that will display latest updates from their favourite websites, freeing them from visitng these sites individually.

Apart from website updates, there are plenty of other features that can be added to the page, these include but not limited to emails, to do lists, webnotes, bookmarks and much more. And all of these in an easy to manage and highly interactive interface. If you spend considerable amount of time online, Netvibes can CONTRIBUTE to your overall productivity CONSIDERABLY. It lets you do and track many things from a single page, saving you all the trouble from jumping one webpage/program to another.

Now lets look at features…

By going to netvibes.com and pressing “Add Content” button on the right upper part of the screen, user gets following menu. Let’s go through some important features of it.

Add my feed: This option lets user to add websites to get updates from. When user presses on the ‘Add my feed’ he is asked to provide the URL for the site’s feed. If you are not familiar feed is then simply look for something like RSS, ATOM or XML on the site you want to add, if found press on one of them and copy the address of the destination page and add it. If not found then simply add the address of the site and netvibes may locate it itself.

Netvibes ecosystem: This is something really cool, once you get used to it. Netvibes ecosystem is a place where you can get a lot of stuff for your account. For instance you can some basic games to you page (ex; Pacman) and much more. The best thing to do is to check it out yourself.

Featured Feeds and Feed Directory: display featured and directory of feeds, respectively. This can be a good place to get some feeds.

Gmail / Yahoo Mail / PopMail: Using these tools it is possible for user to get emails right on his netvibes page.

Webnote / To Do List: These features let user create notes and to do lists. One advantage on having notes and to do lists stored online, is that they can be accessed from anywhere. We have alreadt profiled different ‘to do lists’ services here.

Flickr Photos / Delicious: While I haven’t personally used this one, it may be interesting to some. flickr photos lets users to get photos from flickr (profiled here). And delicious feature enables users to get tags from their delicious(profiled here) accounts.

Writely Documents: writely is new google owned service that which can be called an online word processor. By embedding this feature into your page you can work with word documents as well.

Bookmarks: Tool to store bookmarks/favorites. But if you are delicious user, there is no need for this one.

Box.net: This tool get’s user 1 GB free of online storage on box.net. Once itegrated it is possible to add/remove right from netvibes’ account.

Digg: Lets you get news from digg. If you are not fimilar with digg, then our profile it is here.

Meebo: Tool to inegrate meebo multi instant messaging platform to netvibes. More on meebo here

Apart from the fatures mentioned above, Netvibes offers a really amazing user interface . If you go to netvibes.com, you can see that the content boxes can be easily moved from one place to another according to your preference. In the same way each box can be colored and named.

Also within your profile you can have several TABs, which function as TABs on Firefox browsers. This feature offers even more space for grouping and organizing the stuff. For instance, during the ‘world cup’ in germany I had one tab that was llocated only for world cup related stuff. On this tab I would have latest news from official site, articles from several blog sites, related pics from flickr.com, schedule of the matches etc.

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