nan | 楠木

Netvibes launched its ginger platform recently, which had been in limited beta for quite a while. It’s basically a shot at making a personal startpage into a social network, where you can easily share your startpage with others (you can create your own “universe”, the equivalent of Pageflakes’ Pagecast).

It’s a fun little thing, but frankly I’m getting wary of all those shared stuff (like friends’ shared items in Google Reader). Information overload. But I can see its appeal. Anyway here’s a test page I did if you’re interested – it’s basically my collection of web2.0 and technology related feeds that I read daily. Nothing especially new, just the big brands such as TechCrunch, Techdirt, Mashable, Ars Technica etc. Which is again highlighting a cliched finding – those blogs, with their deep insiders’ perspective, are the place to go nowadays to be up to date with the latest industry news, instead of your usual Reuters / AP etc.

But none of those topics are what I’m mainly going to rant about – I just want to say what a pain Netvibes is sometimes. Like today for some reason some posts just won’t display, and I had to click on them to open the original website page – which as everyone knows basically defies the whole point of having a RSS Reader in the first place. And I couldn’t find an open discussion forum (they had a forum for developers, but that was off topic for me) to see if anyone else was meeting the issue. So I ended up filing a feedback form. And then somehow things just worked. Very strange.

Anyway, during this brief period of time I was tempted to move to another personal startpage. iGoogle unfortunately didn’t offer the same kind of seamless integration with their RSS reader (switching back and forth from reading a feed to viewing the whole page). Pageflakes has it, and the reader is arguably better in its presentation, but it didn’t support keyboard shortcutting to get back to the pages view (or at least the ESC key didn’t serve as that function).

And then I have a small complaint with the fact that you can’t export your feeds in Netvibes. At least I couldn’t find a place to export it all in a OPML file. Again not easy for me to move.

Anyway, I’m just glad that Netvibes is normal now. Still, after this short trial of other services you could definitely see areas where they did a better job, so Netvibes – keep up the innovation!

And finally, on a side note, I found myself using Google Reader to read friends’ blogs and Netvibes to digest loads of information. I just find the startpage format much more capable at presenting a sea of information for you to dig into (you can very quickly scan the headlines of different blogs and jump back and forth), as opposed to a Reader with a list of feeds.

So that’s it for this meaningless post.