The first time you use this feature, you have to authenticate with each of the social networks. Once configured, links are published to your Facebook News Feed and to your Twitter stream. (Note: Facebook Connect only works on Firefox at present). An option to email items instead is also provided.

The individual articles found in RSS feeds also have a sharing option which is activated by clicking on a yellow star next to the word "share." This feature lets you save articles with an optional note for later reading . The saved articles are placed in your private activities section.

It is this last feature that has Netvibes' users up in arms. Because the star and link reside on a separate line beneath the article headline and introductory text, it takes up valuable screen real estate which impacts the number of entries which can be displayed on a page. Out of 26 some comments (at time of writing) on the Netvibes blog, a surprising majority of them (25) were against the yellow star for this very reason. Everyone was requesting that this feature be optional, so they could shut it off.

Although 25 people aren't the entire Netvibes user base, they are a good representative of the most enthusiastic of Netvibes users - the ones who take the time to read and respond to the company blog entries. In this case, we think they may have a point. Hopefully Netvibes will take this into consideration and make some tweaks.

However, the user outrage issue shouldn't overshadow the big news of the day: a Facebook Connect sighting in the wild! We just love those. After Netvibes fixes the above issue, the new sharing features are likely to become popular ways to make the entire Netvibes experience more social and fun.

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php Product Reviews Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:45:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Google today made an announcement that could prove to be not only important to the evolution of OpenSocial and iGoogle, but also to the social networking sector itself. Google announced a new developer sandbox for iGoogle that includes support for their OpenSocial APIs. Essentially, Google is working toward turning their start page property into a social network, though they haven't overtly said so. Google's move makes this officially the start of a trend we're seeing in start pages to get more social, and an idea we've been pushing at RWW for the past year.

We have no idea what the "final network" will be, but it certainly seems to hint at the further social networkification of iGoogle. We think that's smart. In May of last year we theorized that start pages were very well suited to take on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. "Whereas Facebook is just launching their platform," we wrote at the time, "Netvibes and Pageflakes each already have an evolved and popular platform ecosystem in place. What they lack is the social scene." We called adding social interactivity features to start pages the "next logical step" for those companies.

A couple of months later, it appeared that taking on social networks was exactly what Pageflakes and Netvibes were planning to do. "Start pages will challenge the existing social networks - it's almost evolutionary for them to become social networks," wrote Richard MacManus.

In July, we laid out a plan to fix Yahoo! that revolved around building out a developer platform for their web-leading start page, MyYahoo! The final step of our plan was to make the platform social.

And just last week, Pageflakes was acquired by LiveUniverse, a move that we saw as a step toward the further socialization of Pageflakes. "Along with [MySpace founder Brad] Greenspan, LiveUniverse has original MySpace engineer Toan Nguyen on its management team. That's some serious chops in the area of social networking, which is where Pageflakes has been heading since ... last July," we wrote.

Google's announcement today may just kick off an industry wide trend toward turning start page properties into social networks -- often, as Google goes, so goes the web. That makes a lot of sense. Start pages generally already have rich developer ecosystems with many useful apps, and because they act as "first stops" for many users, they're already sticky. Adding in social networking functions just increases utility for users.