It’s like your enterprise portal software (i.e. Vignette Portal) but free. LOL.

In other news, Yahoo! will shortly let you publish your My Yahoo! page, killing off Netvibes.

Netvibes is much cooler than My Yahoo… no way Yahoo can kill it like that.

It’s a nice way to try and bring users into the Netvibes world who aren’t using it already (and therefore increase pageviews).

I don’t see it catching on though…

I think the customization is what really puts it over the top. Looks cool.

BTW, Michael, your link “Netvibes.com/TechCrunch” actually just points to netvibes.com/universe

Netvibes is my default homepage. It would be really useful for blog-networks to have the public page with aggregated content.

This is sort of what I was thinking they would do, but better.

I like Netvibes, who I ran a review of recently, comparing them to Google Personal, which ended up being a somewhat one-sides affair.

I also like what Yourminis have done, by moving their widgets over to Adobe Apollo, which creates all kinds of possibilities…

I love Netvibes, they getting cooler and cooler.

It’s interesting to see that the notion of Context-driven Personalization (http://www.sramanamitra.com/blog/572) is starting to filter into the Netvibes strategy. However, in the Techcrunch Universe page, Mike, you can also insert a ton of your entirely personal stuff that may not be contextual, making it purely personal, I guess.

The screenshots look awesome, especially the Forbes

but where is the appeal for personal homepages? i have yet to see it actually catch on…can anyone fill me in?

I use Netvibes every day…..it has absolutely changed the way I use and interact with the net.

Im excited to see that they will be expanding their offering!

Seems to be a company - that can dominate - home pages -

- then again - Who is there to buy them? Netscape? heh

- With no “buy out” option I hope they are currently running profitable. Becuase finding funding with no buy out hopes is tough - RB

Boooring. everything that netvibes is doing with their GUI and user experience is just bad. their usability was not planned very well. There are too many controls and buttons and settings.

and now they want the user to design their own CSS?
(you gotta be kidding me)

which means the “average joe” will not really be able to do any cool customizations - and - we’ll wind up with a million “customized” netvibes homepages with the design savvy of the average MySpace page.

when is netvibes going to realize that the techie audience that embraced them from the beginning is a different demographic than the one they will need to cater to if they expect to take their success to the next level?

they need to start building useful tools that “regular people” can use.

If you like this, you’ll love PageFlakes. It doesn’t have the personal CSS feature, but the widgets (”flakes”) that they have are awesome. It has been my home page for the past 3-4 months.

It’s interesting to me that Yahoo and Google are being left behind by the innovation coming out of companies like Netvibes and Pageflakes. Pageflakes has had the public customization for some time now, so I’m not surprised to see Netvibes roll this out.

Well, if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, I guess the guys over at Pageflakes should be pretty happy. I don’t know if it’s going to work out for Netvibes though, Netscape copied the functionality of Digg and I guess it helped a little, still, we’ll have to wait and see.

I use Netvibes daily. It is my homepage, and I can’t wait until it hits. Brilliant I say. Absolutely brilliant.

It’s funny all those guys arguing that Netvibes is copying Pageflakes while Pageflakes is since *day one* a complete rip off of Netvibes. All those Pageflakes supporters that are “spamming” each blog post about Netvibes are totally amazing.

FD, I agree. They keep bringing up that this is an imitation of PF features (sans CSS/HTML customization), when in fact Netvibes has had the ability to publish a “tab” to the ecosystem for quite some time.

That said, I’m wondering if this is just an upgrade to the “Publish this tab” feature, or are there really some other customization going into it?

I think the customization is what really puts it over the top.

It’s coming….

“Maintenance

We are currently upgrading our server infrastructure to serve you better, please come back later. ”

netvibes.com is under maitenance…

While this will not directly affect how I personally use Netvibes, it is a nice feature.

Netvibes is really bringing out the ‘big guns’ against other personal pages with this update.

Also, it seems the roll out is causing them to do some server upgades…

this is a great news, congrat to netvibes for innovating again !

personnaly i have used netvibes since day one, and for what I know pageflakes is basically a rip off of netvibes.
I remember reading the open product roadmap of netvibes on their wiki way before pageflakes was implementing anything. I don’t see pageflakes innovating their weather module, webnotes, myspace, video etc… are just dumb copies of netvibes modules !

yeah netvibes should have been faster to implement their own roadmap but at the end of the day, it’s the one I’ve choosed and I woudn’t change for anything else

Uhm… not sure what to think of this. Myspace had this ages ago and even smaller startups such as Pageflakes released the exact same feature (just better) about a year ago: http://www.transworldnews.com/.....ntDtl.aspx

If this is what Web2.0 is all about, I can only shake my head. Copycat feature again. What’s up Netvibes? Running out of fresh ideas?

Terry

I second William (comment #6) on this one. Yourminis has been on to the public pages for a while, they do it well and being able to very easily do any layout you want makes them much more user friendly to non-techies… And the possibility to embed the widgets on their page, the web or the desktop through apollo… is just beautiful.

The other start page that does this is Protopage http://www.protopage.com - but they allow you to configure the page much more and share the page privately as well as publicly

Looks like a decent release from Netvibes. I particularly like the CSS customization they support.

These guys and PageFlakes are my favorites in the AJAX homepage game right now.

PageFlakes had a new release a few days ago with some nice features…worth checking ing out:

http://www.pageflakes.com/Comm.....logPost=76

How long is this bloody upgrade going to take? I rely on Netvibes now. If it’s not up by the morning, I’m moving to Pageflakes.

I can only see growth in this space, particularly in the personalization space. Take a look at this demo which demonstrates the ability to build a functional CRM platform in 5 minutes on Google personalised home page. Once you allow users to create their own pages, build personalised public pages and then design their own look and feel, you have a pretty wonderful personalised user environment for both individuals and SMEs. Disclaimer: I consult to the company behind this widget creator.

Mr X > LOL Nothing will make me switch to Pageflakes, Pageflakes is definitely too bugued and my experience is that bugs are never corrected.

This is awesome! Just what I wanted.

Finally I can have a mandy moore stalker page!

~zombie chuckles nervously`

Netvibes is quite good. This new development will do ok but it is quite a crowded space. There are so many sites where you can do this sort of thing.

Now the site’s back up, but all the bleedin’ Techcrunch readers are clogging it up and making it slow! Get off my start page :p

I don’t see any appeal to NetVibes, Protopage, or PageFlakes. Google IG seems to work fine for me, and it’s *never* down for maintenance. Why would I want to see anyone else’s personalized home page? I doubt anybody else shares my unique tastes in life. Why would CNN want to publish a Netvibes page? They have their own page with CNN.com.

By comparing with My Yahoo, google & My MSN with Vibes, personally felt Vibes as the best among all. I am planning to write some good features of Netvibes in SU - Suggest Usability.

~
http://www.suggestusability.com

This is a brilliant move from a business standpoint, and is exactly what I had intended to do with my start page, startster.com, when I launched it in 2004 (and haven’t changed it since :P)…

Anyone who doesn’t see the value in using a start page must not be using them right, because they are one of the greatest time saving tools you can use…

Kudos to Tariq and the NetVibes crew for launching this and for such a fine implementation… The next step is enabling people to cname their domains to their custom page… Then their uptake among third parties will really skyrocket!

@Colin
Then I guess I’m not using them right.

I still don’t get what these startpages are meant for. They kind of look like their purpose is to pool news items, but isn’t that what we have syndicated feeds for? If their purpose really is to gather information, then I have to say that the design (specifically, the design as shown in the screenshots), is horrendous. What am I supposed to do, sit there and absorb all the headlines? There is simply too much clutter and information placed on a single page. It might be useful for light internet browsing, but any period longer than that and the efficiency will just continue to get worse.

This is pretty cool! But netvibes guys, you are blaming Pageflakes for nothing. They introduced public page, page templates, sharing, widget export long time back. I think it was mid last year. Netvibes does bring things late all the time, but they do heck of a marketing out of them. Poor guys at Pageflakes seems to have a better product, but much less marketing power compared to netvibes.

Agree, Zen, Pageflakes does have the better product. I do like Netvibes as well, though. Actually, I’ve set Netvibes as the startpage in Internet Explorer and Pageflakes as the startpage in Firefox. :-))))

I found myself using Pageflakes more frequently, though, because I’ve set up a page that I shared with my family…which is really neat.

Netvibes doesn’t need more social networking features or pages with nice logos dedicated to Newsweek feeds (since when did the community, or Netvibes itself, know what I want to read?)

What Netvibes needs is more useful web app modules, and in particular a module to facilitate the creation of feeds from sites which don’t have them. Feed43 could provide it.

If Pageflakes worked with Safari, I would have tried it ages ago.

Now that’s just cool! People who have public facing pages should be able to pimp it with there own CSS if they are capable. Good on Netvibes!

C’est vraiment trop cool, merci Netvibes

“which means the “average joe” will not really be able to do any cool customizations - and - we’ll wind up with a million “customized” netvibes homepages with the design savvy of the average MySpace page.”

And the problem is..?

excuse me, but Netvibes are not “innovating”. Windows Live already lets you share your own collection of feeds/gadgets etc with the world. http://www.live.com.

So… who will be the next to buy netvibes?

They need to add some revenue generating tool for the Netvibes page creators - like Google adwords. That’ll give us incentive to create pages that the masses will come to.

Up dates are nice, but I need an invite so I can “crate my universe”.
Someone that is in the know please send me an invite.
mikey11(AT)mchsi.com.

I’ll stick with pageflakes, have been using their public pages for personal and work. Love the simplicity and clean design of pageflakes.