Early on in this blog I waxed poetic about Bloglines, my trusty feed reader. However, enough people were telling me about using other newer, better aggreagators that I started to get nervous. Some of my subscriptions weren’t coming through — was it the site’s fault, Bloglines’s fault or my own? I couldn’t quite tell, and got pretty good at ignoring when feeds wouldn’t come through. But then Lifehacker kept talking up Netvibes and I decided I had to sneak a peek.
I’m sorry to say this, but I think my Bloglines account may be a thing of the past. Netvibes is a lot like Pageflakes, an RSS-and-more site I’d seen a while ago. While Pageflakes never caught my fancy (I think it was too soon after my love affair with Bloglines started for me to have eyes for anything else), Netvibes instantly struck a cord with me. I think it might be the so-2.0-it-hurts design (all rounded corners and silvery hues), or it might be the endless fun of rearranging the feeds and changing colors and inserting sticky notes and to-do lists…
There’s a lot more to Netvibes than just reading my RSS feeds. I can see today’s weather, have searches set up and ready to go, see pictures from Flickr, view my calendar, quickly access my del.icio.us account and so on. This is was Web 2.0 is all about — it’s easy to use, it’s fun, it’s customizable, it’s constantly being improved with new widgets and modules, and most of all, it’s really useful. It was all the same functionality of Bloglines, but makes it prettier and more interactive.
Never underestimate the pull of prettier and more interactive when considering appliying 2.0 principles to library services and programs…
I would have said the exact opposite. Pageflakes caught my fancy because they really pull together everything in one page, including the option to share your page with friends or even publish it for everyone to see. Bloglines or Netvibes don’t do that…
Frank
Frank,
I can definately see your point about how Pageflakes is superior in that it allows one to share a page. I could see how that would be great for, let’s say, a Reference Department to have one page they could all share filled with flakes pertaining to library work. However, I still find Netvibes easier to configure and much more customizable. I can only assume they’ll provide page sharing in the future, right?
I did some more digging in Netvibes and found that you can share your modules and tabs, although perhaps with not as much functionality as Pageflakes.
I also, however, discovered that there appears to be no easy way to save a post from a feed. That’s one thing I already miss about Bloglines. Oh well, maybe this will force me to be more dedicated to keeping my del.icio.us account current!