* Build your own portal with Netvibes
While it possesses some strong similarities to Google’s user-customizable home page, Netvibes goes much further in some areas.
When you first connect to the Netvibes site, you may be surprised at the presentation – it is a generic personal portal page without much in the way of instruction as to what you should be doing. The answer is that you should click on “Sign in” in the upper right hand corner of the screen, which provides both a registered user login and a link to new user sign-up form.
Upon signing up, your customizable home page is immediately available without any kind of opt-in confirmation. This is an odd choice given the hackers and other n’er-do-wells who like to abuse such systems just for the fun of it. You also get an e-mail confirming your name and password.
Netvibes supports all of the major browsers and uses AJAX to manage user interaction and screen layout.
The screen is divided into three columns and you can add, edit, delete, and relocate content panels or, as Netvibes calls them, modules. You can also have multiple pages accessed through tabs you can name.
There are currently more than 260 modules available from Netvibes that include Web search, RSS and Podcast feeds (you can select your own or use Netvibes’ predefined feeds), Gmail, Yahoo, and POP mail readers, Writely documents, To Do lists, Ical viewer, eBay portlet, Flickr photo viewer, … it is a long list. Netvibes even integrates the excellent Meebo IM service, which we covered in this newsletter.
If you want to develop your own modules for Netvibes there’s the Netvibes mini API.
Netvibe Modules are described as “simple HTML pages that you host on your Web server like any others. The modules can be complex, with multiple pages, forms and scripting server side (with php, for example).”
The publishers of Netvibes go on to note that: “The philosophy behind the Mini Module API is to be as simple as possible, in a spirit close to Microformats.” (Microformats are becoming a major new focus for thinking about data and its manipulation.)
Netvibes is currently free and just ripe to be acquired by a major Web player looking for one of the best personal portals available.
