Personalized homepages: Netvibes

I just read that Netvibes added tabs (meaning you can add tabs to your page). Netvibes is another personalized homepage like Google Personal Homepage, but I like it better. The interface is great (very efficient use of space) and user-friendliness in general is excellent.

Some Features

• Adding feeds and bookmarks


• View new messages of all your e-mail accounts


• Small utilities like Todo-list, Webnotes and Bookmarks


• Add and keep track of your other Web 2.0 * apps like your Writely documents, Flickr photo's or Del.icio.us bookmarks


• Just like the Google Homepage, you can drag, move, close and edit items


• Did I mention tabbing?

A nice extra are the setttings, where you can choose the number of columns or give more space between lines.

Overall I think it really stands out compared to Google Homepage or Windows Live. Google Homepage has some really nice functionalities, but items take up a lot of space and it gets crowded quickly. Also you can't add tabs, so you're limited to one page.



Windows Live has a slick design, and you can add pages instead of tabs, but it isn't as clean and intuitive. Besides, what's that gigantic search box doing on top of my page? Anyone not searching with Google these days?



There are some other interesting web-apps out there, like:

• Goowy: all Flash, and more of a desktop app. It looks refreshingly different from the rest, but it's relatively slow (and lack of speed is a crime on the Web).
  


• Protopage: freeform, you can put your panels anywhere you want, I personally think it's a bit messy and I don't like the overall feel.
  


• Zoozio:
  they just changed their name to Zimbio - erm, talking about a meaningfull name change.. I haven't tested this one yet, their homepage looks promising though.
  


• and Pageflakes: which looks solid but quite boring, don't call me in the middle of the night for this one.
  

All these web-apps are currently popping up like mushrooms. For now, I'm sticking to Netvibes, but I'm curious to see what's out there a couple a months from now.

* (Web 2.0? Try this: anything carrying a fuzzy, warm and tacky name like Furl, Spurl, Writely, Dabble, Rollyo or Bloop is probably a Web 2.0 company. Go check it out on http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/02/play_guess_the_.html)