I’ve mentioned Netvibes here a few times, but I’ve just been meaning to say more about it, because I love it so much. I started using it well over a year ago. Switched around to some other stuff here and there, but always come back, and at this point, I don’t see switching again unless something far better comes up. I hate using the term “it changed my life”, but it definitely changed the way I use the web.
If you are totally clueless about what Netvibes is, it’s simply a personal home page where you can add links, notes, and all kinds of other modules. Whatever computer you go on, you can log into your Netvibes page, and there you are, right at home. When you think about what people think of in terms of how computers can improve their own personal lives, generally thing like “keep track of appointments, todo lists, weather, news feeds, documents, etc.” The idea is not that a computer enables those things, but that it makes them easier. But if you look at how people use computers, they have their documents in various document programs, weather on some web page, news feeds on some other page, todo list and appointments in some program or two. It takes digging around to find anything. And if you don’t happen to be on your own personal computer, you are pretty much screwed.
So with Netvibes, you can have all that on one dashboard, wherever you go where there’s a computer. Of course, there are other similar systems, Google’s personal pages probably the most popular. I’ve used Google, and it’s cool, but Netvibes seems so much more usable, customizable, etc. One cool feature I love are the tabs. I have 10 different tabs on my Netvibes page. My main tab has stuff like my bookmarks, weather, gmail, todo list (Remember the Milk module), gCal and the Twitter module. Then I have about 5 tabs mostly for various RSS feeds, categorized by what subjects the feeds are about. Then I set up tabs for any project I happen to be working on. I throw in a generic todo list and a web note. This lets me keep track of things I want to note about the project and things that I need to do on it. Sometimes I’ll add other modules in there as needed. The webnote module is also great for posting random links. Just copy the url and paste it into the web note and it becomes a clickable link.
While the default settings page lets you customize your page fairly decently, the Netvibes Customize allows you to go all out in tweaking the appearance. Some other modules that I love are, as mentioned, the Remember the Milk and the Twitter modules. Remember the Milk is an online todo list site. You can organize and manage your tasks. I tried it out a while ago, but again, it was one of those things that you had to go to the site to see your list. Out of sight, out of mind. Now it’s fully integrated in this module, and since I almost always have my Netvibes page open, my list is always right there. The Twitter module was a similar nice find. I fell out of use of using Twitter because it meant logging into the Twitter page, or firing up one of many different 3rd party Twitter apps. Not something I always remembered to do. Now, it’s right there on my Netvibes page.
A while back Netvibes got something like $15M in funding. I already loved it then, but they’ve added so many new cool features since then, it’s 10 times better than it was. My only fear is that eventually the investors are going to want to get something in return for that money and it’s either going to start sporting ads, or become a pay service. For what it’s worth, I’d gladly pay to continue using it. By the way, this is NOT a paid blog post or anything of the sort. If you look through the site, you’ll see I regularly post extensively about products I love, and complain about things that piss me off. Of course, if Netvibes wants to send me some cash… 😉