Netvibes: the return of the power start page

Way back in the mists of the dawn of the internet, there was once a young Prince among the new internet pioneers, that Prince was Yahoo and their key technology was what was called a web portal. A central hub of content, news, and services. Yahoo gave you the ability to personalise this portal with your own page, imaginatively called "My Yahoo!", in which you could pull content from the main portal and customise and arrange how you see fit.

I recall back in the late 90's and early 2000's that this was my hub of choice and was a fundamental element of my desktop productivity. At some stage however, I stopped using My Yahoo, and later eventually migrated away from all their services (as late as 2007) and sadly said goodbye. This move, you guessed it, was initiated by the arrival of new services that did the job better. Namely, Google. But while GMail, GCal and Google search became an integral part of my online life, iGoogle (Google's answer to My Yahoo), just didn't cut it for me. Specifically the UI was horrid. So my start page days were dead and buried. It was a case of constantly customising my various machine desktops and browser settings specific to that machine. This was a pain, and even with browser tweaks, your customisations were still tethered to specific machines. You couldn't jump on another machine and get all your personalised content to go.

So after a number years messing with machine desktop customisations with each change, the need for a centralised personal portal became more pressing. Also, even with all my most needed resources bookmarked and close at hand, I still found myself managing and switching between multiple windows. So I though I'd check into iGoogle and see if anything's been updated. Sadly, no. Cool gadgets, but still the horrendous UI. I knew of Netvibes but never tried it, namely because I didn't want to move outside of Google's metaverse, but this time thought I'd give it a try. A web search of "google inside netvibes" brought of the following useful links:

http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2007/12/11/google-reader-in-netvibes-solved/

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/05/04/web-worker-head-to-head-igoogle-vs-netvibes/

http://mashable.com/2007/05/08/netvibes-personal-office/

http://www.christine.net/2008/04/goodbye-google.html

Initial thoughts. Powerful widget platform. Can add services with a drag and drop, mind you some can be improved upon. Not only can you separate content and services via tabs, but you can also add dashboards which essentially equates to desktop workspaces. This means you can contextualise your work and cut out distractions. So personal items can be easily separated from work items for example. Although very powerful and intuitive there was one thing less intuitive, and that was the ability to copy tabs. You would assume this would be in manage dashboards, but you can achieve this by clicking the share this tab button. Other gripes. Feed content does not update immediately. Hopefully this is a bug with the new Netvibes Wasabi version and will be ironed out at some point.

Overall, have found it a powerful aid to desktop productivity. Haven't decided to ditch Google Reader, as would prefer to just integrate that into Netvibes. Haven't been successful with this so far, as Google as place frame restrictions on its content. If anyone, knows any further Netvibes tips, then please let me know.