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.
I hope you like that post!
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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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