Netvibes.com Blog

Trends, sports & many other cool widgets for summer!

Diane — 2009-07-02T14:12:42+02:00

News & infos - Wimbledon championships are nearly finished, but there is still the final to come! If you have missed the previous tournaments it's never too late to inform you by reading Wimbledon's latest articles! Where to go ? what to buy ? Follow the trends, read Trends update and you'll know what's cool & sexy today! If you're a Drupal user have a look at Drupal.org widget! You'll find some tips and news + follow some groups & discover new modules. Entertainment - Now a girly girl widget for trendy young woman : Handbag! Regrouping celebrity gossips + beauty & fashion tips all in one widget! What about some music to relax during this beautiful summer that you are spending in front of your computer ? On Comfortcomes it's all and only about music : read Interviews, follow music tours, discover new albums, watch cool videos...Etc. Then you could learn how to make cocktails or find cool recipes on Life 123 Food & drink and you'll be ready to celebrate summer!

Get a faster Netvibes with the new Firefox 3.5

Maurice — 2009-07-01T12:30:00+02:00

Mozilla Corp. just released the latest version of their browser: Firefox. This new version brings major speed improvements that will make your Netvibes significantly faster. If you're running an older browser, you might want to give it a try. To download the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, go to http://www.mozilla.com/. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux in many languages.

For an even better experience, get the updated Netvibes Extension for Firefox. In one click, you will be able to:

share any link with your contacts
subscribe to RSS feeds
see all activities in a sidebar

To install the Netvibes Extension, go to addons.mozilla.com, and click on "Add to Firefox".

A new Netvibes user is born

Maurice — 2009-06-28T09:23:38+02:00

We're happy to welcome a new Netvibes user, Emiliano who was born last night. Warmest congrats to Annabelle, our Managing Director!

And we have a special theme for the occasion: apply the theme ''It's a boy''

June top widgets

Samy — 2009-06-26T18:56:14+02:00

News

Business & finance

Sport

TV, movies & music

Tools & technology

Fun & Games

Lifestyle

Shopping

Travel

Discover new widgets with our recommendations

Maurice — 2009-06-23T18:50:00+02:00

Since the beginning, we've always made sure that Netvibes.com stays an open platform. Everyone can create and distribute their widgetswith UWA and the Ecosystem. Today, you can add more than 182,000 widgets from the "Add content" panel. That's more than anyone can use, so we've been working on a recommendation engine that will help you find what's interesting for you.

How it works: matching and learning

1. Matching profiles

The recommendation engine, named "Talk to Me", will first analyze millions of Netvibes personalized pages to categorize widget usage behaviors and widget page combinations into hundreds of "matching types". Then, based on the context of the widgets installed on your page, it will recommend new widget based on similar matching types. You'll notice that it has found new widgets by the small badge on the "Add content" button.

For example, if you're a sports fan and thousands of users with your "matching type" are using the ESPN basketball video widget, it will be recommended to you automatically.

When you're interested by a recommended widget, simply press the "Add" button to add it your page.

2. Learning from you

If you think that one recommendation isn't relevant, just click the "X" button to tell the engine that you're not interested, and you'll never see it again.

We fully respect each user's right to privacy by performing all analyses anonymously. The feature is being rolled out progressively. All you have to do is be patient. If you have any question or concern, send us a message with the feedback form, we will do our best to help you.

Using public pages as virtual libraries!

Diane — 2009-06-19T18:59:54+02:00

A growing number of libraries use Netvibes public pages as virtual resource centers for their users. From academic literature, news, to documentary resources or podcasts - there's an abundant of options. To add, Users are not just happy to locate reading suggestions online but the convenience is a huge time saver!

Our list of public libraries include: The Cranbury Public Library (US), Biblioteca de l'Ateneu Barcelonès (Spain) or the the Dublin Public City libraries (Ireland). They're ideal places to organise events, surveys and online tools & resources.

Other institutions such as schools and universities, use Netvibes public pages as virtual resource centres. Go to King's School Library (UK) for book suggestions and news to read and The University of Sheffield library's public page (UK) for conducting research, organising documents, bookmarks and read online newspapers.

Both Discovery College Library (Hong-Kong) and The United World College of South-East Asia (Singapore) has organised its virtual resource space into various tabs. Namely; Podcasts, Videos, Poetry, Art, web2.0. and many more...

Another interesting use of Netvibes public pages is the The Language Library! Built by the Oxford university's language library, here you can find content & news in many different languages, just like The Dixie Grammar School (UK).

Let's not forget the incredible work done by specialized libraries eg, Central Medical Library from The University Medical Center Groningen (Netherlands) or Biblioteca de Farmàcia from The University of Barcelona.

Lastly, if you have built a netvibes public page for your school, feel free to add a comment or post the link on twitter @netvibes.

We love discovering new great pages!

Here are some ideas of Travel, finance and news widgets to add!

Diane — 2009-06-12T10:05:22+02:00

Travel - Before planning your trip, check out Uptake's travel blog! There you'll find many useful advices like "how to prepare a road trip ?", "where to travel with children ?" and many other interesting points. Travelpod is a cool widget, where you can read travel experiences from Japan to Kenya. You'll certainly be amazed when reading such fabulous stories! They haven't been written by novelists, oh no! They're just travel lovers like you and me ;). Discover many great places and wildlife scenes on BBC earth a video widget, that surely brings on some inspiration! Jump with Australia's kangaroos and swim with Bahamian dophins, welcome to earth :)! News - Here's another BBC widget : BBC finance news divided in 4 tabs : "economy", "companies", "Yourmoney" & "Business". It's so much more handy and time saving to have it all in one ! On Belfast Telegraph read the latest news coming from Nothern Ireland! You won't miss any important information with this widget covering all important subjects : "Home", "NI&UK", "World" & "Sport". Then, on Scotsman news read fresh news from Scotland : sports, business and exclusive headlines !

What's up at Netvibes?

Maurice — 2009-06-10T18:00:00+02:00

Behaviour change on Public Pages

We've recently made a change to Public Pages behaviour and we wanted to notify you. The change affects the way tabs and widgets are displayed. A few months ago, we added the possibility to have "transparent" widgets. Making a widget transparent means that you can see the background image through the widget (unless the widget forces a color).

With the recent update, we are going further by hiding completely the widget title, making your Public page look even better to your visitors.

The same kind of change has been applied to the tabs: when there is only one tab, the whole navigation is hidden.

Please note that these changes only apply to your Public Page as your visitors see it. If you're logged in, you will still see the titles and the tabs.

Share on Netvibes with Shareaholic

On another topic, we're happy to announce that you can now share links from all over the Web with your Netvibes contacts thanks to the Shareaholic browser extension. Shareaholic is one of the most popular sharing tool and is available for most browsers. Go to http://www.shareaholic.com/ to check this extension out!

The week's Xbox, health and Canadian newspapers widgets!

Diane — 2009-06-05T11:37:38+02:00

News - You want to be in a good shape, and you're interested about keeping a good health? Check out Healthy fellow it's full of great advices and interesting news about health, medicine, and new products. The Fast company is a specialized webmagazine about technology, design and ethonomics and it's all regrouped in one widget! Even more faster and cooler! You want to know what's happening right now Canada ? read the latest news from the most famous canadian newspapers! Install the National post on your page! It's one of the most popular magazine and their widget displays recent articles in four tabs : "Top Stories", "Canada", "World" & "Business". Otherwise you could install The Vancouver courrier for exclusive news coming right from the city of Vancouver! Games & tech - To Xbox 360 fans, here's THE place to get all the infos you need on 360 junkies! It's a cool widget divided in two tabs : one for the news and one to follow their Twitter, so add it quickly to your page! Then, check out tech news, on Techpowerup read about the latest computers, screens and many other techie products, geeks only :)!

Netvibes for mobile, iPhone and iPod touch get Multiple Personalized Pages

Maurice — 2009-06-03T15:00:00+02:00

Last week, we introduced the Multiple Personalized Pages that allows you to create a Personalized Page for each aspect of your digital life. We just upgraded the mobile version of Netvibes so you can access these pages on the go too. As usual, the mobile website is available at http://m.netvibes.com/. It should work with any WAP 2.0 handset and Webkit-enabled devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberries and Android phones.

Depending on your phone capabilities, you will get either the basic or the advanced mobile website.

Switching to another page with the basic version

With the basic version, your Page list is displayed at the bottom of every page. Simply select your page and click "Go" to access the desired page.

Switching to another page with the advanced version

With the advanced version, taping on the page title will unfold the Page list. Simply tap on the page name to open it.

If you encounter any problem with the mobile version of Netvibes, send us a message at http://www.netvibes.com/static.php?show=feedback.