I have been using Netvibes for the last few weeks and this was my initial post about Netvibes. Based on the experience of the last few weeks, I have a few suggestions for the Netvibes team.
1. Have a Pin-Up facility for a feed. (By Pin-Up I am referring to a sticky facility. Basically, if I should be able to lock the position of a feed to a place on the screen.)
2. Ability to highlight only the feeds that have new entries after a refresh/reload. Along with this the facility to expand only those feeds which have new entries would be really helpful. (This can be another option next to “Expand all”.)
3. Have a newspaper style browser similar to what pageflakes has.
4. Provide a Save facility for the Webnotes. There can be a “Save to Desktop” or “Save by Logging on” facility added. This would be helpful in accessing the notes across computers.
5. Provision for storing the structure of the pages in the OPML file. (If this is against the OPML standard then call Netvibes Markup Language or by some other name and provide this facility as an option.) This facility can be useful if I want to use the same structure which I am logged in and when I am not logged in. The other important thing about this facility would be to provide an OPML which other sites can also use without any problems.
6. If possible a provision to display all the new feeds from the time the last feed was read. This might be difficult due to space constraints.
7. Please, please a faster load time. It takes at least 15-20 secs to load on a broadband connection. (Speed > 512Kbps). Please do something about this.
Ok, Something about their Business: ” Netvibes is a start up company created in 2005 basedin Paris and specialized in Web 2.0 applications. We are open to allbusiness opportunities, please contact us at : business@netvibes.com” This is from the About page of Netvibes. Are they trying to make themselves available to acquisitions?
Some time ago I was acquainted to use goowy, it was a really nice service, but i don’t want a OS. So I decided to use GoogleIG but i really don’t like it, it’s not too personalized, so I discovered Pageflakes, i like them because they have skins, sharing feature and integration with other services such as flickr, del.icio.us, gmail and others. For a while my choice is 1 – Pageflakes, 2 – Goowy , 3 – Netvibes, and 4 – GoogleIG.
I checked out some start pages in the past months and there are many good services available. My personal favorites are Pageflakes and Netvibes. At the moment I prefer Pageflakes because it offers you a feature to share your pages with friends and colleagues. I think that’s a very useful and powerful feature and adds a whole new dimension to collaborative work. Of course, I also use the pages for my private needs. Looks like you linked Pageflakes wrong in your text above…
Best regards
Mikey
One main issue i have with all these startup pages is that none of them cache the content on the machine. I want an option wherein a cache feature can be switched on and off – so that they dont download all the stuff from the net again and again.