The space of online RSS readers is a small pond with plenty of big fish. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all thrown their hat into the ring with their own offerings, but one single company continues to innovate, and continuously trump the big boys with it’s offerings. A spunky startup from France… Netvibes.
You only have to read their blog in order to see the advancements they have made over time.
With it’s emphasis on constant, continuous improvement, and features which really appeal to users (They even set up a wiki for users to provide feedback), it’s no wonder that they recently managed to gain a significant amount of additional seed funding from Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon).
Their latest innovation on their long list of feature improvements are tabbed pages, so you can now group your feeds and modules into multiple pages, and more options in content formatting.
Yes, these feature have been on other readers before, but they don’t have the same feature set as Netvibes currently in place.
Coupled with integration across services to the which allows you to access the following directly from the Netvibes start page:
- Box.net to supply 1 GB of online storage
- Flickr to stream pictures of selected tags to Netvibes
- Del.icio.us to ensure your online bookmarks can be accessed directly from your start page.
- Gmail mail so your email updates are seen right away.
- (There are more services integrated, but these are the ones I use on a regular basis)
…and Standalone modules like:
- One-click podcast listening client - to listen to your favourite podcast no matter where you are from the start page.
- Webnotes and To-do lists, that are online and easily accessible for convenience (especially useful when using two computers at home and at work), and on the start page.
…There is no doubt that at this point, they are the best online feed reader/start page - by a mile.
Related Links:
RSS and online RSS Readers
Netvibes.com
Netvibes Blog
Netvibes Wiki
Technorati Tags: netvibes, rss, gmail, del.icio.us, google, yahoo, microsoft, box.net, podcast, flickr, gmail
April 9th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Hi,
I read your comments on web based personalized desktops. I was wondering if you have visited Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com) already? We are offering a similar service allowing you to read news feeds and setting up multiple pages that can be customized with local weather, address book, todo lists, event finders, TV guides and much more. Looking forward to hearing from you. Maybe you have some thoughts on what we can improve.
Thanks and best regards
Tegan
April 9th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Netvibes offer a much nicer user experience IMHO, and I think they have as much api modules than pageflakes for now
April 10th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Not bad… Pageflakes has a slick looking interface, but in terms of speed, I didn’t like it. It took a fairly long time to load up individual feeds everytime I wanted to read the feed within the pageflakes, where Netvibes preloads a lot of the feeds, and it becomes a much faster user experience.
Pageflakes does not seem to have a “Read all” option in their feed reader, which allowed me to load up all stories in the RSS feed, and just scroll down to browse the entire feed. In Pageflakes, I have to click each individual link in the RSS feed for it to load up in the reader.
Could not find an OPML export option on Pageflakes. One of the reasons why I risked netvibes was that I could easily switch out easily if I needed to. I’m not sure I can do the same if I switch to Pageflakes.
The pageflakes cross service integration modules look great though…
May 6th, 2006 at 7:24 am
Have you had a chance to see http://www.yoosi.com features? The have a solution that looks similar to other sites – though they let their users manage there content. If you create something, you can remove it from the gallery with a click – or change the content at anytime. They let users have freedom to create what they like. They built it so all you need is a URL to integrate with the platform – good job Yoosi.com