Discovering Netvibes

custom start-pages made easy

As probably many of you already know, Netvibes is a free Web 2.0 service that enables you to build a custom remote start-page.
Netvibes offers a lot of different widgets that you can choose from to build your custom content, from web search to RSS feed readers, from weather forecast to integration of other Web 2.0 services, like Flickr and Writely.

(Sorry, screenshots are in Italian only)

I have to admit I have not so much time and I’ve tested or used very few Web 2.0 services, but I found Netvibes particularly useful.
I turn on my Mac in the morning, I open my browser and there I have my Netvibes homepage, with all the contents I need at a glance. Having no more than a bunch of minutes to read news and blogs, browsing Css galleries and stuff, Netvibes is a great way to aggregate RSS feeds in a single page, side by side with my local weather forecast, Italian newspaper articles and the good old Google search.

The built-in To-Do lists feature is definitely good and useful as well as the Note tool (when you copy & paste pieces of code…).
The painless integration with other common Web 2.0 services (Flickr, Writely, Del.icio.us and more) and the ability to poll POP and IMAP email accounts (including GMail) make Netvibes also a good substitute of your computer when you’re away or have to do your stuff from a friend’s pc or from an internet café. All you need is an internet connection and your Netvibes login name.

Netvibes also has a nice tabbed UI, available in different themes / colors. And this is defintely a plus. Sometimes Web 2.0 apps mistake minimal UI design for no UI design at all, but this is not the case.

Netvibes is translated in a lot of languages and it’s good to have it in Italian too.

Moreover Netvibes is adding new features week after week. It has a custom API for developers to build new modules and contents for Netvibes.

The Netvibes Ecosystem is a side project aimed to collect publicly available modules and a community for sharing and commenting each other’s content. The Ecosystem is a great source for fresh RSS feeds, podcasts and events calendars, shared and reviewed by other Netvibes members. Each module and each content can be added to your custom homepage with one click.
And it’s growing quickly!

If you wish to read a far more complete review of Netvibes, I recommend this article on Solution Watch. Solution Watch is a must-read website for reviews and previews of Web 2.0 apps.