Comments for Netvibes Launches "Coriander Edition" - a SUPER Personalized Homepage

Netvibes Launches "Coriander Edition" - a SUPER Personalized Homepage

2007-03-19T06:24:42Z

Netvibes, one of the leading 'personalized homepage' products on the market, today officially released its new version - nicknamed the "Coriander Edition". This edition has been under discussion for the past month on the Netvibes blog, but today it is being officially launched. Incidentally Netvibes is now using the term "super-personalized homepage" to describe itself - nothing like a bit of added hype to stir things up! The new Netvibes edition comes soon after the My Yahoo upgrade announcement a couple of weeks ago.

While My Yahoo is the undisputed market leader for personalized homepages, with 50 million users according to comScore, Netvibes is the leading startup. Netvibes currently claims to have "nearly 10M users" (an unverified figure). Pageflakes, which recently re-located to Silicon Valley, is also competing well in what is a pretty tough market. Each of the Big 3 (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) has a horse in this race.

But to the new Netvibes release - what's in it? Here are the main additions, in list format:

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New "Netvibes Reader" with multimedia capabilities;

New "instant sharing" capabilities - users can share their feeds, modules and Netvibes pages via email or instant messaging (essentially this is "private" sharing, rather than public sharing which Netvibes already had);

"Quick start assistants" to make it easier for new users;

Netvibes2Go is a beta preview of Netvibes' mobile edition, which pushes and syncs Netvibes directly to cell phones or other mobile web devices;

New Craigslist and Map Search modules;

Over 30 more languages, including a Chinese version with localized content - Netvibes now claims to support over 80 languages.

The new RSS Reader is the main addition - it features games, podcasts, music, photos, videos, and live sharing capabilities. In the past I have found it difficult to use the likes of Netvibes and Pageflakes as RSS Readers (although other people have had no such problems, so it's perhaps a matter of taste). The new version doesn't seem to have solved my main issue - which is that you can't easily track hundreds of feeds in it. Nevertheless the addition of more types of media (podcasts, video, etc) is welcome. To describe the new Reader, Netvibes founder and co-CEO Tariq Krim found a new meaning for the RSS acronym - Really Sexy Syndication!

New media and podcast features in the Reader

Conclusion

Netvibes has been releasing a lot of new features recently - e.g. its Universal Widget Platform (a.k.a. the Netvibes API) aims to make Netvibes widgets available on every widget platform or blog system; including Google IG, Apple Dashboard and others. Its competitors are also busy - Pageflakes recently released a "video flake" and Webwag launched its "Widget On Demand" in February.

My feeling though is that all the small players are competing for some of My Yahoo's 50 million users. Netvibes may well be a "super-personalized homepage", but My Yahoo has a super-advantage with its 50M user base.

I was actually wondering recently whether Netvibes would be an acquisition target for Yahoo, so that the big Y could get some of that super functionality that Netvibes offers. But it now seems that Yahoo wants to build up their own service, in-house. Therefore we can expect some aggressive competition from the startups over the coming months, focused on features (as in the Coriander release of Netvibes) - to try and entice bigco users across to their services.

Update: The topic of this week's Read/WriteWeb poll is: Which Personalized Homepage Do You Use?

Comment from tobto on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T08:43:12Z

Very pleasant and welcome enhancement of favorite app of all SEO Freelancers

Comment from Andrew Davies on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T11:51:22Z

Glad to see other companies are also spicing up RSS - simple text feeds are great for professional/driven/expert users, but often not engaging enough for browsing consumers.

I love the RSS = really sexy syndication. This works so perfectly for our RSS-to-glossy-magazine technology.

Comment from Charles Knight on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T12:23:07Z

Not to give away any trade secrets, but if you are wondering how I track 500+ Search Engines (in order to select the most CURRENT Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for R/WW; it's my customized Nevibes page. I have 42 RSS feeds, all search engine related, and neatly arranged in colorful columns. I woke up this morning with 109 articles waiting to be reviewed. Because of Netvibes' functionality, I can probably reduce that to 0 in an hour or so. Of course Netvibes will allow you to choose almost any topic/feed or number of modules. I "heart" my Netvibes!

Comment from michel on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T20:21:38Z

Snore...bascially, this is Netvibes copying the innovations that others have already brought to the market...and they aren't very good copies.

The New My Yahoo already has the ability to "gift/send" stuff as a "copy" to a friend, and has a multimedia RSS feed module. Pageflakes has way more sharing features, including public and "wiki like" collaborative features. There are a ton of other RSS readers on the market, and Google and Pageflakes also have their own. Pageflakes has an awesome "start" wizard for newbies.

The only thing I see here that's cool is their mobile stuff...which again, Google has.

C'mon Netvibes, give us something really interesting if you want to beat the big boys.

Comment from Maroo TV on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T20:28:15Z

I don't get how this is novel?

Comment from terry on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T20:39:26Z

don't you know that SBC and BT traffic are counted within the "50 million" MyYahoo users?
:-)))

Comment from Dan on 2007-03-19

2007-03-19T21:19:10Z

Have you seen Widgetop?

Comment from jason66 on 2007-03-19

2007-03-20T03:56:27Z

10 million users? didn't another blog just released some nielsen net ratings numbers about yahoo and google pages? i think it showed clearly that the 10 million users are a false number.

jason

Comment from veri9tas on 2007-03-20

2007-03-20T15:34:52Z

re:"The new version doesn't seem to have solved my main issue - which is that you can't easily track hundreds of feeds in it."
which sites, or online readers do you use to easily track hundreds of feeds in it?
bloglines, for example, lets you add and hyperlink-list lots of feeds in left column and read your choices in the right column.
netvibes lets me read headlines (with tooltip excerpts) from 11 -20 feeds depending on how many I choose from "edit" .(or scan in seconds on a single a4 page printout, via printscreen and croping
Are there any other sites where many sites'headlines with links to each site can be read simultaneously- more or less- on a single screen . would appreciate any sites that make reading hundreds a day fast. thanks

Comment from veri9tas on 2007-03-20

2007-03-20T15:35:16Z

re:"The new version doesn't seem to have solved my main issue - which is that you can't easily track hundreds of feeds in it."
which sites, or online readers do you use to easily track hundreds of feeds in it?
bloglines, for example, lets you add and hyperlink-list lots of feeds in left column and read your choices in the right column.
netvibes lets me read headlines (with tooltip excerpts) from 11 -20 feeds depending on how many I choose from "edit" .(or scan in seconds on a single a4 page printout, via printscreen and croping)
Are there any other sites where many sites'headlines with links to each site can be read simultaneously- more or less- on a single screen . would appreciate any sites that make reading hundreds a day fast. thanks