I’ve been playing with Netvibes, after Howard Rheingold’s rave review of the site’s ability to help make sense of information abundance. It’s taken a while for me to cobble my sites together, and I’m still working through some more advanced ideas with the tool (integrating Reader alerts with it). I guess oneof the start up costs have been the time it’s taken to find all the feeds and add them to my Netvibes desktop. Previously I had worked with the Windows Desktop widget for RSS feeds that did an OK job – although it forced me to use Internet Explorer. I never really got into Google Reader, much like how I got into (and out of wave) after the fact. I like the idea of distributing my identity around a couple of sites, not only for redundancy, but for privacy issues as well.
Now that I’ve got a lot of feeds working into it – I feel like a quick glance and I have a brief understanding of what’s going on, and I think this sort of aggregation has a nice element of serendipity to it. Often I click on a posting I want more information about, click once or twice, and find something related (or entirely unrelated).