Sam Davyson

I had been using Google.com/ig ever since it was released. But since my default browser has switched to Safari I find that Google’s homepage doesn’t quite cut it for me. Also in the recent Mashable Social Networking awards I noticed that a lot of other start pages were getting a lot of attention. I tried Pageflakes, but couldn’t quite take that, and then played around with Netvibes.

Here is what some of it looks like:

This is pretty much the first non Google product I am using in a space where Google has got a decent product already. And it feels kind of good to do. I thought that I would have difficulties with my calendar (which is managed and edited in iCal but broadcast to Google Calendar) and my email etc. since they are all on Google. But no – thanks to open standards I was able to pull off all the data to this independent service.

There is one module/gadget/widget that I can’t find a replacement for. And that is the Google Reader one. Netvibes is great with RSS – it is basically built with RSS completely at it’s core – but it doesn’t have one module that will serve me up all the new items from all of my favourite feeds. I have to have a separate module per feed. Luckily Netvibes is pretty fast loading and I keep all of the feeds over on one tab so it is ok, but it is not perfect. However on the flipside, still in the area of RSS, netvibes does have one advantage over Google – it has an ultra lightweight feed display function for viewing full posts. Very simple, but very good. Just what I want.

Speaking of the tabs – they are one area in which Google’s homepage really doesn’t perform well. Switching between them seems to involve a request being sent to the server and correspondingly it takes far too long. With Netvibes you can choose to have all tabs load at once – or just the the first tab to. I have all of the tabs load at once so it is lightning quick to change between them. The final highlight for me is that Netvibes counts up all the new items that you have on your page and displays the total in the title of the page. So if I keep it open I will know when I have something new to see to. Whether that is a podcast has been released, or I’ve got an email, or there are new photos from my friends on Flickr, or a new post on a blog, or … Netvibes can handle it.