Written on April 29, 2008 – 3:48 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“The most important migration of netvibes history starts today” says Tariq Krim on the Netvibes blog. “We are moving all Netvibes users to Ginger.” The Paris-based personalized start-up service now also offers the new functions - such as your public page, new widgets and a social media flavor - to users who used to work on Coriander. So that means my non-geeky friends have to switch as well.
True party picture with
Tariq Krim last week
Together with Facebook and LinkedIn, Netvibes is one of the few services that my friends who don’t care about the latest developments in the Web 2.0 use. They don’t like Twitter, couldn’t care less about Friendfeed and have never heard of Flickr. Yet when I showed them my Netvibes page, they were immediately convinced about its advantages. I hope the new version doesn’t confuse them, as it offer a wealth of new features. Especially as Netvibes imitations that are totally focused on simple user-interfaces keep popping up. Have a look at Dutch service Symbaloo for example.
Yet I don’t want to get too negative here. Tariq and his team have done a great job. At last week’s Netvibes party he has told me what kind of effort the switch takes - like translating content to 140 different languages -, and that was rather impressive. Moreover, for people who are more web-savvy than average, Ginger is for sure a real improvement. It looks slicker, offers good and public aggregation of all your online content, and if you have the need, you can see what your friends are adding to their “Netvibes Universe”.
So be aware when you open Netvibes today…
I hope you like that post!
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Written on March 4, 2008 – 11:22 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Since the 100 private beta invites we offered you a few weeks ago were gone in less than an hour, lots of you guys will be glad to hear that Netvibes launches the Ginger version today.
Ginger not only looks good, it has several interesting new features. CEO and founder Tariq Krim pitched the service when we were in Paris this month, showing us this:
Your Digital Life All in One Place: less surfing time since almost literary every service offers a Netvibes widget.
Activity Streams: follow your friends to see what they’re adding to their page, like new pictures and videos.
Your Universe: gather everything you want to share with the world on this page. An easy way for not the not so web-savvy people out there to create their own digital space.
Krim in a press release: “Imagine sharing the entire spectrum of your digital life, from your Flickr photos to your Facebook and MySpace friends, YouTube videos, favorite blogs and news sites, widgets and more, all from a single page that your friends and family can easily enjoy and personalize. We’ve gone from the personalized private page to the personalized public Universe.”
So the big picture here is that Netvibes wants to create a community with Ginger. Therefore they’ve made it easy to import friends and contacts from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts. I guess Ginger will be really viral, since a lot of those millions of users won’t be able to resist the temptation of easy friends importing.
Written on February 4, 2008 – 3:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Saturday we had drinks with founder and CEO of Netvibes Tariq Krim. During a great party in Amsterdam’s hippest club Jimmy Woo, he promised us - kind as he is - 100 private invites for the beta version of ginger. 5,000 users already tested the social adventure of the personalized startpage service, now it’s time for the next group. We gladly accepted Tariq’s offer because, dear reader, even during a party we’re thinking of you.
Most important new functions of ginger are the ‘My Universe‘ option and the possibility to follow your friends.
So head to ginger.netvibes.com and enter this code: NEXTWEBBLOG. If you want to express your thankfulness in any way, please feel free to stumble our blog or press the ‘digg this’ button. In the mean time, we’ll look for new ways to express our love to you.
Written on February 2, 2008 – 2:33 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I don’t know what they feed the developers at Plaxo but they just keep on coming up with new products and services. We have written about Plaxo a lot here at The Next Web Blog and there are two reasons for that. We like their service and they produce a lot of news.
Just today Plaxo launched a new feature titled ‘Plaxo Personal Card‘. It brings together all your publicly declared feeds or “me links” with the aggregated stream of content from Pulse. Also, it happens to be the first application of the new Social Graph API from Google which was released yesterday, as you can read on TechCrunch. As the guys from Plaxo say: “Now you can share with others one site that pulls all of your online worlds together.”
Sounds pretty fancy, and it actually is, since this means that they’ll compete with LinkedIn from now on. They both offer a public profile, combined with a network of your business contacts.
Plaxo has the advantage of offering a public profile and several syncing services, of which the address book function is the best. Yet LinkedIn seems more suitable for professional networking. Not everybody wants their potential boss or business relation to read your Twitter feeds or to watch those Flickr photos of that awesome party last night. You’d like to save that till you know them better. Of course, you could choose to leave the pictures and tweeds out, but what’s left then?
If you keep all those functions, Plaxo seems like the perfect way to gather all your published on-line content. And they’ve released it just in time, since Netvibes will soon launch their ginger version that includes the ‘My Universe’ option. As you can see on this screenshot of the closed beta version, it’s kind of similar to the Plaxo profile. But it’s not presented as a stream.
As we all know, combining and aggregating our on-line content that is now still scattered around different services is THE trend of 2008. Plaxo is one of the most innovative services in that field right now. And as long as they keep that up, we’ll keep writing about them.
Written on December 8, 2007 – 2:17 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Just a few days from the private beta launch during Le Web 3 in the beautiful city of Paris, Netvibes is teasing its audience with some new screenshots of their social adventure: ginger. Tariq Krim published a blog post today, describing the new features that will make it possible to involve your friends in your personalized start page.
It can basically be summarized in three steps:
- import your friends from other social networks, such as Facebook;
- track what widgets they’re adding, photos and videos they’re watching;
- create your universe, and show the world your social networks, Flickr photos and Twitter updates.
A personal universe can be an outcome for anybody who is not blogging, or capable of building his/ hers own homepage. Since it will be a place where you can present your on line identity in a rather spectacular way.
Krim promises us he’ll keep revealing more from ginger the coming days. If anything revolutionary happens, we’ll let you know. Moreover, we’ll travel to Paris to attend Le Web 3 and cover, amongst other interesting events, the beta launch of ginger.
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