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.

Blogger.com on Opera. Arrgghh!

Forgive me for the misleading image. This isn't a comparison piece on the pro's and cons of the respective blogging platform, but precisely the pain I suffered using Google's Blogger on my favourtie browser Opera.

Without risking the need for another comparison piece here (maybe for another day), I've been flirting with Opera since 2001, after a Norwegian colleague introduced me to it's ferocious speed. I must admit I was blown away back then, but for some reason never switched over completely. Even so, it was usually on my handheld device or as a second or third browser lurking somewhere in the background. Well I finally switched over from IE to FireFox completely last year after playing with it off and on for years. However, even on the gorgeous Mac OS X Tiger, Open Source heaven FireFox is not. So many crashes, freezes, go slows and hang ups, hair pulling and cursing my poor ISP for something which is totally not their fault. Thus despite it's Open Source heritage, FireFox has become more bloated than even it's Microsoft rival. More like SloFox or FatFox. So after yet another umpteenth crash, I returned to my Norwegian friends and the cool embrace of Opera. Ahhh, solace at last. Well so I thought.

Opera runs like a dream. The only issue I've encountered thus far, is when logging into Blogger.com via my Google accounts. First few tries I kept getting a strange refresh after seeing a white rectangle in the top right hand corner of Blogger's front page. After a few clicks I was forced to sign in again to Blogger after already signing into Google Accounts. things got worse when I changed my Opera cookie settings to "only accept from sites I visit". Then no matter what I did, Blogger.com would just not accept my login attempts. I then came across this post after a Google search and changed my cookie settings back to "accept all sites" - which I don't like, but going back to that little white rectangle, I could see some almost invisible white text teling me to "continue here". I clicked and I was in. Well shame. Hope it gets fixed sometime soon, together with the odd Ebay on Opera interface issue. Small price to pay for bullet train browsing, or major security headache? Whatever, I'm gonna persevere as it's much less headache than FatFox.

Sexy Google All Pervasive

I recall those early days of the net way back when in the 90s when everything was fairly amateurish a la CraigList and the familiar modem squelch sound when dialling in. Back then when searching for anything, you had a choice from the likes of, AltaVista, HotBot, Excite, Yahoo, AOL, Jeeves, Webcrawler, InfoSeek, and Lycos amongst others.

Those were just some from the top of my head and ones I recall using all the time. Then fast forward circa 1999, I'm working for a large IT and business services firm, and I'm stuck on some design issue so I visit the web design department and seek some help. My colleague suggests why don't I try Google. "Google?" I ask. As she lost her mind? "Yes" she says, "Google.com." That was the first I ever heard of Google. Despite my introduction to the web over the previous few years, many changes were brewing that I was barely aware of. Now we find ourselves squarely in the 21st century, I hardly use any other search engine, apart from the odd shopping directory for bargains. Google has become my benefactor and pervades so many aspects of my digital life. Why even now I am writing this Blog from my Google Blogger account (yes the chip's firmly in the back of my head). Similarly, a recent post on Digital Journal details many of the pervasive and practical applications Google now provides. I sometimes finding myself, just checking one of the alternative search engines just for a change but the results don't seem to be as comprehensive. Why bother leave the comfort of your Google armchair when Google can solve everything for you.

Why stop there? Why don't they just buy out Vodafone, Tesco and News Corp, and clean up all the worlds issues whilst they're at it. Gattica here we come...