Tools We Use: Netvibes.com
Business 2.0 recently profiled Netvibes as a Disruptor and guess who they are shaking up… Google and Yahoo. Now, this claim may be a little early, but we’ve both been using Netvibes here in this office for a a few weeks and its become an indispensable tool for us.
Netvibes basically is a customizable homepage that takes current Web 2.0 design principles and technology to reinvent the homepage. I’ve been using the MyYahoo as my homepage for the last few years, and the truth is as so many other technologies have been moving forward, My Yahoo has been getting a little creaky. Especially as I’ve added the 100 or so RSS feeds that I try to keep up with every day from blogs I’m reading, Netvibes is coming along at just the right time.
What we like about Netvibes:
Intelligent RSS feed adding — you just enter the blog URL, Netvibes is smart enough to guess/find the RSS feed. This is going to make RSS syndication a lot more accessible for people who are new to this technology and easier for us.
Ajax functionality for everything — want to divide your feeds into different tabs, move the feeds around on the page, open a post in the window and not go to the blog, its all packed in there. Netvibes has created their software around the user experience and how people will be using their site.
We use it — This is not just a Web 2.0 company you read about on TechCrunch and use for a few weeks because its the hip company du jour, we actually use it and are sticking with it. Once you upgrade your technology, you’re not going back and this is why Business 2.0 profiled Netvibes as a disruptor.
What we don’t like:
Its a memory/bandwidth hog — I’ve got over 100 feeds loaded in Netvibes, so maybe I’m stretching it, but when I have it open, everything else slows down. It seems to refresh every feed everytime I reload the page, which I think probably is what takes so much bandwidth. It would be nice to have a setting where we could reload feeds every hour or two rather than on every page refresh. Not sure if this is technically possible, but its my one gripe right now.
I had the pleasure of meeting Tariq Krim at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Fransisco last month. He and the rest of the Netvibes team were clearly the hot company of the show from a VC perspective. We appreciated Tariq’s as an early supporter of Huckabuck.com, and we are excited to see these disruptors headed for success.