There’s quite a few Ajaxian start pages around at the moment, and more popping up all the time . There’s iGoogle, Microsoft’s Start.com, and Yahoo’s MyYahoo in terms of the big three, plus sites like Protopage and Netvibes, the subject of this blog.
I’ve had a brief play with most of these portals, but settled initially on iGoogle as it offered a way to group some useful gadgets around it’s powerful search engine, my engine of choice for many years. However I found it slightly clunky, slow and not 100% reliable, and when I started using Google Desktop’s “Quick Search Box” for launching my searches iGoogle took a back seat and I ended up switching back to the classic Google homepage for speed reasons.
Then an article about the popularity of Netvibes, your very own “digital dashboard”, caught my eye and I decided to check it out. The experience was very pleasing and much slicker than Google’s effort. It also offered great functionality in terms of reading RSS feeds, so much so that I quickly ditched my desktop RSS reader, Feedreader, and imported all my feeds into Netvibes. Now I can access my feeds wherever I go and no longer have synchronisation issues between home and work.
As well as displaying RSS feeds, there are modules for displaying local weather forecasts, a calendar supporting iCal, bookmarks, notes, to-do lists, multiple searches, support for POP3, IMAP4 email as well as several webmail providers including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL, Box.net web storage, del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr photos and there’s podcast support with a built in audio player.
I’ve really enjoyed using Netvibes and strongly recommend you check it out!
Filed under: Web stuff
Protopage “Care-n-Share” My very own website, is the one for me!
True freedom to be chaotic if you wish!
Unlamented says : I absolutely agree with this !