Adding Netvibes to the mix….

Not so long ago I had written about some online tools I’m using daily. I have to update my position on some aspects of what I had written earlier. I had first explained that I was using three different online feedreaders, ( Blorq, Google Reader and Rojo) as I was maniac, unable to decisively decide myself for one among them and perhaps a bit out of fantasy as well.

A few days ago, I received an email from Six Apart, the company that had acquired Rojo in the first place. Although they were not specific, they were announcing that Rojo was taking a new path and would no longer be a feedreader, so users had to basically pack up and export their OPML files and feeds. So I found myself left with two services instead of three. But lunacy cannot be cured that easily. This is how I found myself looking for… a third service replacing Rojo!

And there starts the interesting point: I had shunned services such as Netvibes or BubbleTop. My reasons for this were mostly due to their interface, that is, their way of organizing information and feeds. I found that displaying them in squares or “bubbles” was not the most convenient method. What I also found was that for some reason when one feed would be clicked on some window would pop up (all this, of course, inside the website interface) and the feed or the whole article would be displayed, barring the view on the rest of the feeds. This is still true for BubbleTop. But ever since the latest version of NetVibes “ Ginger”, I believe that something akin to a “Copernician” revolution has happened inside the NetVibes interface.

What has changed -unless I got that wrong- is that despite the interface works pretty much like before, each time one clicks on a feed the interface switches to a different frame where the content is displayed on the main section while the other entries’ titles are listed on a panel on the left. In short, the whole information works like before as an overview (squares and boxes of categorized feeds) but once you want to read any of them it basically becomes an interface that is similar to the one of Google Reader or Rojo. And that is something that made me start using Netvibes.

Now, I also realize that Netvibes is a lot of other different things: customized homepages, widgets, development platform, etc. But although I might be using only one portion of its service I really enjoy it. Thanks to Nick Barcet for the nice tip!