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).
Been a Netvibes fanboy for a couple of years now. it’s interesting how my use of it has changed. In the beginning I used it as a reader/subscription service (my pre Google Reader days), but now I use it primarily as an alert dashboard.
Blogs and subscriptions go into GReader (and I use Feedly, a custom skin for GReader that has some nice options and a better UI IMHO than the vanilla GReader interface). In Netvibes I have my Gmail account, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, some podcast and vodcast subscriptions. I also have it set up to pull in the RSS feed from my Delicious network so at a glance I can see what they are bookmarking. I also pull in feeds from keyword searches on Twitter, Delicious and Diigo for things like Desire2learn and WordPress – two products i support.
Netvibes is indispensable to me – the tool I use everyday. Can’t rave enough about it.
Yeah, I’m finding it a great tool that does a lot for me – I’m not as advanced as you though. I’m only using it passively, just using it at it’s simplest way, as an organizer. I do like the look of it (although most Google products look terrible) much better than other stuff out there. I think the next step is to start pull feeds in from searches – see how that works.