Netvibes Appears to Be Dying
Popular start-page service Netvibes may be in its final days as a viable product. The service has been suffering frequent, extended downtime, hasn't been fully functioning even when up and can't possibly be making as much money as its backers hoped it would.
Update: Please see our follow up post on this topic - I Was Wrong; Netvibes is Not Going Down The Tubes.
Start-pages are highly customizable services that display RSS feeds and lots of other little tools inside widgets on a page. The most successful have been MyYahoo and iGoogle. There used to be a horde of startups trying to enter this market but the energy is largely gone. When your startpage doesn't load, your personal entry point into the web has failed you and it can really put a damper on your day. That's where Netvibes is right now. Update: The site is back up again. If you want to export your feeds and try one of the many alternatives, now's your chance. It turns out though that Netvibes still has a lot of very happy users, as you can see in the comments. We're glad to hear it and despite our deep frustration and worries that the company isn't doing well - we really hope we're wrong.
In the meantime, the service is just failing to load altogether again today. Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini said last month that the company's service provider has had repeated problems supporting users on the West Coast of the US, but we've tested it from all over the US and are seeing the same problems.
It's enough to make you take your OPML file and go home. That's a real loss because Netvibes is probably the best in class among start-pages, in terms of features. It works in Firefox and Safari, has an excellent mobile version and just feels more powerful than the alternatives.
Unfortunately, business can't be too good at Netvibes. The company's business model revolves around sponsored widgets, search ads and a handful of sponsored pages like Ogilvy PR's The Daily Influence. (That page is also currently down.)
We'd guess that none of those monetization plans are working out as well as the company hoped they would. The company may soon suffer a fate similar to that of rival Pageflakes, which was recently acquired by Live Universe. Live Universe was founded by one of the MySpace founders, Brad Greenspan, and that company is now where washed-up content goes when it is put out to the pasture of remnant bulk advertising.
We sure hope you can get it together Netvibes. We know you had dreams of tens or hundreds of millions of people happily building their own little corner of the web, assembling and sharing topical collections of pages and making Netvibes the center of their online worlds. Those dreams may not have worked out so far, but we'd still appreciate it if your damn site would load for those of us who have put it at the center of our time online.
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Oh boy, this is going to cause a stir...
Poor netvibes, it were very useful while I had it but the downtime and it never remembered my password, caused me to switch my homepage.
iGoogle & popurls - still the best combo out there.
I love Netvibes, but I run into these problems on a daily basis. I hope they can get it together, but I wonder: should I start to back-up the 80 feeds I read to another service? *sigh*
netvibes working fine for me. Indeed, some loading issue last weeks but nothing very long. What about gmail outage or recent hotmail down ?
I always have it open and only ran into a couple of downtime issues. Granted, I don't get paid to sit around on Netvibes all day so I just have it in the background but I can't say it's caused me any real problems.
Works just fine for me - and has for a long time. What's the agenda behind this story?
Actually, I concur with Marshall, Netvibes was my goto start page but over the last several months, feeds have not been loading, it has not been able to remember my password repeatedly, and it simply has felt like they are taking their eyes off the ball. It's too bad, because I really do find the service useful and better than the alternatives.
Would be nice to hear from NetVibes directly on this thread.
Hope you can turn it around!
Adam
Chris, the agenda is that I'm pissed off that Netvibes keeps going down. And when I think about where the business stands, it doesn't look good to me.
Marshall,
At first I thought you were the fastest blogger I've seen since your post is exactly 6 minutes after went down ;)
But looking at your screenshots dated jan 9th, you may have prepared this post last month?
That being said, I do apologize for the downtimes we have experienced lately. We did post a detailed explanation on our blog http://blog.netvibes.com/?2009/02/27/248-update-on-netvibes-status and users can monitor our service status at http://faq.netvibes.com/service_status in total transparency.
Netvibes is far for dying. What we had again this morning (PST) is another failure from our load balancer. We thought that issue was solved last week. We are going to change it in no time. Again, be sure we are doing all we want to avoid this.
Now, while I'm a bit surprised you jump from a downtime to bankruptcy or simply business failure, this gives me an opportunity to update you on where Netvibes is:
Netvibes focuses on "Personalization".
1. We offer Personalization for Individuals with netvibes.com. One use is netvibes as a startpage but many use it as a watch page like the Dublin public libraries http://www.netvibes.com/dublincitypubliclibraries#Home for example. This is free and our business model is to deliver widgets through our Sponsored Widget placements.
2. We offer Personalization for Brands and Publishers.
This is turnkey solution to create your personalizable page. Works like iWeb, no IT required and definitely a stickier landing or central page than a flat HTML. Users can add, remove, change and customize the page at will. Now, users can have several personalized pages across the web. We are working with many ad agencies, amongst the biggest, as you noticed.
3. We offer Personalization for Enterprises.
Since end of last year, we offer to install Netvibes behind the firewall of our clients. Rambler in Russia was amongst our first clients. Coming from the outside with a popular product, a super powerful widget technology to develop their own internal widgets and close to 180,000 widgets available generate lots of interest for this solution for Intranets, large sites and ISPs.
All in all, we may have been down today, and I again very sincerely apologize for that, but we are not down from a business standpoint. Far from it.
Freddy
I am connected to Netvibes at least 12 hours a day (most days more) and would absolutely hate to see it disappear. I have tried all of the others out there over time and none of them stand up to it as far as I am concerned. I have had very little stability issues with it (maybe down for a couple of minutes every couple of weeks, but if you can't live with that in a free service, get a life!).
I live in Finland and I have very seldom had problems loading Netvibes. I use it daily.
Is this maybe solely a network problem in the US, as Netvibes CEO said???
works fine for me, some outages are understandable. also there is netvibes' deal with rambler.ru which sounds like a good source of revenue.
man, cut them some slack already. where do you come off implying that they're dying? i've been a faithful netvibes user for the past 2 1/2 years. like commenter #10 i am connected to netvibes 10-12 hours per day. personally i've never experienced any extended outages (certainly nothing more than gmail or hotmail). it's a free service which i'm grateful for. i find it better than alternatives like igoogle or my yahoo because they offer more features and empower me with 100% personalization. they're pushing the envelope against some very big fish and i applaud them for this.
I, too, have had some downtime with Netvibes, recently, but also, in the very beginning. Every service incurs downtime. This includes iGoogle and/or some of its individual widgets, My Yahoo and/or some of its individual widgets, and on, and on... No computer server is immortal, and no server programmer writes absolutely bug-free code!
I run Netvibes daily, as I do iGoogle and My Yahoo (and Twitter and Facebook and NewsGator and Evernote and Wordpress on my own website and...)
Some server downtime doesn't lead me to give them the boot.
You go Freddy !
And Marshall Kirkpatrick you were caught!
Clearly you were pissed the last time Jan 9th and then Netvibes came back up quicker then you thought...
Really what is your agenda here ...
Netvibes is still the best (very best!)
Much bigger guys don't even come close.
Soon we will see more true netvibes experience on mobiles with real widgets
I have used Netvibes since close to the beginning. I have experienced very little outages and none in recent history. I love how it aggregates my favorite aggregate sites.
Rock on, Netvibes!
Same for me here.
RWW is my favorite tech blog, but I really hated this post.
You can be pissed at the downtime you suffered but:
1) As many commenters here, I never suffered anything major in 2.5 years. Maybe you should run a poll ?
2) How can you comment on the business model out of the blue ? Do you have insider comments, facts, figures ? Or do you just assume that sponsored widgets cannot make money, and as such, yeah, for sure, Netvibes is dying ?
3) Your headline is going to encourage dumb users to get off netvibes. Don't become the next Techcrunch please, one is enough. Or if you want to, you just have to rephrase your title to "Is Netvibes dying ?" and this will be perfect.
A faithful reader.
Thanks
WTF is this post about ?
Have you ever worked for a web company to write such a thing ? have you troubles with popular services ?
Maybe you should reconvert, your brain died a long time ago.
I still think Netvibes is the best of the best. Even if they did have some downtime recently, I'm not going to move anywhere. I think saying that a bit of downtime = death is a bit extreme. Keep it up Netvibes!
I wonder this article, it's really like a paid one.
I can imagine that at the West Coast or even in the whole US the site has availability problems, but You should ask people at other places of the world. Here, in Hungary, Europe, Netvibes is usually unavailable approximately once in every one or two month, for some minutes. It's been like this for one or two years, since I use it.
In my country people say if somebody's sad to be died, then he will live long. I hope so for Netvibes.
Posted by: kgyst.myopenid.com
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March 6, 2009 12:08 PM
Oh dear.. RWW doing a Techcrunch.
I read this on Pageflakes!!!
http://twitter.com/marshallk/status/1289353808
someone claiming webwag is a good replacement for netvibes is NOT credible at all.
This is the worst post I have read on this site. Really, Netvibes is dying? Have you even looked at Pageflakes lately? While it is true that Netvibes has had some downtime lately: (a) it was for a short time (b) the company gave real time updates on Twitter and (c) also updated their blog and status meter. What more do you want? Twitter is down far more often, and you wouldn't say they're dying. Pageflakes on the other hand has had several outages lasting DAYS at a time, causing many organizations and educators to switch to Netvibes. Furthermore, there has been no transparency where Pageflakes is concerned, no updates regarding service, and support is sporadic at best. Their last outage in January lasted at least 5 days, and Greenspan could not be reached by any tech bloggers who were reporting on the problem.
Some research about this would have been preferable to writing a rant just because you couldn't log in once or twice.
You should go grab a breath of fresh air before you hit the publish button on a story 'in anger'. ;)
Sorry, but I can only feel that this was terrible attempt at journalism. Do you realise the weight that a RWW headline carries around the net? Even if it was "Is Netvibes Dying?" I'd still call it a dubious one.
Seriously, you experience some down time (I have netvibes in a permanent tab that I use constantly every day from New Zealand and have *never* had any down time) and so you decide that it means NetVibes as a business is failing?
This is like TechCrunch/LastFM debacle. RWW needs to have a bit of a think about this article - seriously.
- A long time, but recently and increasingly uncomfortable reader.
Wow. For a second there I thought I was reading Michael Arrington.
Get over it dude. It's not like you're PAYING for netvibe's service.
Once again Marshall is going for page views. The linkbait posts like these are really making RWW a third rate publication. Marshall your level of reporting the past few months has sunk to a new level. This is the reason I do bot read RWW anymore. The others writers are great, you're the one who is sinking this ship.
Tim
Hey, so they've hit a few bumps in the road. It's occasionally annoying, but not nearly enough to make me want to migrate to another service. They're interface is the most attractive I've seen.
Next time they go down, instead of blogging about it, why don't we all do something completely out-of-character and off-the-wall like getting some fresh air and sunshine!!!
Just a thought :-)
Well F it.
RWW goes to Off topic folder in my news reader.
I read this headline and gasped. Yes, a loud gasp, right in the middle of the office.
Fortunately it appears that this story represents nothing new. I was glad to read "Freddy"s comments. It reassured me that the BEST customizable start page on the net will continue.
That said, I have absolutely seen the problems that Marshall is referring to. There are several feeds that continue to report stale data from the Netvibes cache. This is incredibly annoying, but I am willing to put up with this as long as they are continuing to work for a resolution.
Please follow up on this story and repost with some factual information.
One big problem that I have with Netvibes has to do with their Facebook widget. The thing kept automatically updating my status. Eventually I had to block it on the Facebook side because my account at FB was getting flooded with repetitive updates. I've also seen some problems (more lately) that Marshall describes in this post. As a result I'm definitely using the service less and no longer rely on it as my "start page" on a daily basis.
I think that when you put a lot effort or trust into these free services you have to start asking, "How long will it be around?" I think it's a fair question in the case of Netvibes since they want people to invest a lot of trust in them but don't seem to have any major sources of revenue.
"Chris, the agenda is that I'm pissed off..."
Amazingly I don't read RWW to hear you vent. I read it for news. You know.. reporting? Do some next time and save this crap for your personal blog. You 'hear' that other users are having issues? Like what? How many? Any common threads? Comments from the Netvibes people?
You don't think their business is doing well? When the hell did your unsupported speculation become a substitute for getting off your ass and doing real journalism? If you suspect the business is tanking go talk to people and do some research? Show us what the traffic sites are saying about Netvibes traffic... REPORT.
I agree with some of the other posters here. I've noticed some downtime but it's barely noticeable and I have mine running 12 hours a day.
Considering the Netvibes is free an excellent service, the writer doesn't have much ground for complaint.
On that note, I think we users need to get used to the idea of paying for these services. The ad-supported business model is dumb and won't work so unless we're all willing to kiss our cherished apps good-bye forever then we need to start ponying up.
If Netvibes can convince most of its users to pay $4.99, maybe $9.99, a year they'd probably be financially viable and profitable.
I'm in.
By the performance criteria posed in this post, Google is in grave danger. I've seen more downtime and bugs with Google apps -- from Docs being down, to people not being able to access my public Google Site, to Picasa's bizarre UI and functionality quirks -- than I've ever had with NetVibes.
I only experienced a few minutes of the outage today and had forgotten about it by the time I saw this story on Techmeme. Obviously bait to draw readers.
My only gripe with Netvibes is that they don't "buffer" the feeds. If a feed is set by the publisher to carry only 15 entries, Netvibes displays only these 15 entries. If one doesn't read them fast enough - and there are feeds that publish their preset amount in two hours - the older entries are lost They should really buffer 50 or 100 entries per feed. That's a big issue for me.
Appart from that I'm happy with Netvibes. They recently beautified some widets like the weather widget. Also the site doesn't do a complete reload anymore upon F5ing - only the feeds get updated.
Netvibes|iGoogle|MyYahoo = Boring!
Get over it, Dick.
You really need to recognize the influence you have and watch your mouth before it says something that could cause a number of hard working individuals to lose momentum in the pursuit of their dreams. Netvibes is the best RSS reader out there and does not deserve to be on the receiving end of such a slanderous article.
I just lost a lot of respect for RWW.
Most interesting part of the article is the comments!
wow, the viciousness of the commenteres here makes me wonder if the whole netvibes staff headed this way after "Freddy" posted.
Most of you wouldn't know journalism if it bit you on the...butt. Obviously, this service HAS been going down. They openly admit it. And wtf - a LOAD BALANCER fail? Hi, ever heard of redundancy? Try it, you'll like it.
I happen to like RWW, and frankly, anyone who has been around the valley for any discernable length of time knows that service outages and failures are often a sign a business is struggling. The only other explanation is unmanageable growth, and somehow given the total lack of buzz around this category of products, I doubt thats the case. More likely they aren't investing in infrastructure to save money (hence not having redundant load balancers or back-up ISPs).
Netvibes dying?
Never had any problems with netvibes (im in sweden and use it several times a day) and maybe Marshall should be investigate a bit futher before posting this kind of stuff.
RWW -1 point today
:(
Lame article obviously with a hidden agenda!
This article sounds very dramatic: unless some access problems (especially yesterday evening - Europe timezone), I don't understand why shuch a negative opinion?
I was not aware RWW was bashing each time there was a failure somewhere.
Whew... I like RWW, but this article is one of the strangest ever. I am using NetVibes for ages, and I have not experienced any serious problems, except perhaps with some services that were changing the code, which lasted for a day or two max (rememberthemilk and google services for example)
I am seriously suspicious on the bias of this article.
I am on the east coast and sit on Netvibes all day and have never had any problems. No downtime at all for a long time. Given the constant improvements to the site, its dying is the last thing I would expect.
i got to listen to freddy mini on monday talk about his professional history starting from day 1. even if the sustainability of the buasiness model of netvibes is questionable. you can trust the genius mareketer this guy is!
They just didn't get the concept right... sthrt.com seems to have the right concept for a start-page. They ought to just buy sthrt and take another shot at it. iGoogle dominates this concept and has a business model to back it up... that is a key issue for Netvibes.
Google mail was down for a few hours earlier this month. So based on your logic that means that Google is dying as well, right ? Well First it was lehman brothers I hear GM, Citibank, BOA will soon follow, now Netvibes and Google. I guess we are all going to die at some point. But until that day comes, I'm just thinking (like Nietzsche) that what does not kill you makes you stronger, long lives Netvibes.
Hi, I sincerely think/hope this is false.
Webwag is doing well as a b2b actor and while we think Netvibes is an excellent product, we think we also have some very compelling (and sometimes different) assets.
As to webwag being a credible alternative, is a comment on this point coming frome someone that works from Netvibes (stuff), really unpartial?
Eh bé ! Ca risque de faire des vagues.
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