Enter Page Title Here
What Is
Netvibes
If you are reading this article right now, this is
not the only site you browse. While you are online, probably you check your
email, weather, stocks and a few news sites and the list keeps going on and on as
you find cool sites everyday. It can be annoying to check all your favorite
sites one by one and it's time consuming too. Tariq Krim, the founder of
Netvibes thought the same way and he came up with this brilliant idea to put all
sites on one page so you don't have to browse from site to site to obtain
updated information. Of course, you can argue that Google and Yahoo did the same
by offering personalized page ... long time ago but Netvibes does things better
and easier way than those big guys and the looks are a lot better than Yahoo and
Google.
Impressive Stats
Its no wonder
15,000 people visited on the first day of it's launch in September, 2005 and
more than five million users signed up. 60% users are from the US and there are
users from more than 100 countries. 10 percent of users keep Netvibes page
active throughout the day and use it as entry point into other sites.
Ecosystem
Netvibes offers
ecosystem - made of pre-programmed modules which are made by users and you can
put them on your own Netvibes page just with a click. Modules can be as
different as news feeds, blog feeds, stock charts, weather reports and hundreds
of different things. Lets say you added an RSS feed on your Netvibes page and
you think it is cool and would be be useful to other users..you can publish this
RSS feed on ecosystem with a click. Very simple and
easy.
Months To Verify?
I have created
Netvibes modules for www.adawn.net and many other sites and some of
them stopped working without any reasons. To keep my module active, I wanted to
delete the inactive one but I could not find delete option anywhere. Finally, I
had to create another module for www.adawn.net. Also, sites submitted
in the beginning of October have not been verified yet by Netvibes team. A
module is not available to other users until Netvibes team verifies it and if
takes months to verify... its a sign that Netvibes needs to hire more people to
keep up with heavy traffic.
Not Alone
competitors are not
napping in the meanwhile. Lots of other sites are popping up with similar
concept and they have the financial and technological support to compete
Netvibes. Webwag, Pageflakes, Protopage and many more are working at a
tremendous pace to catch up with Netvibes.
Future Unknown
It would be
interesting to see how Netvibes starts earning money. Investors already pouring
in millions of dollars and Netvibes has not mentioned anything yet about how
money can be generated. I would not be surprised to see the only exit point
being sold to Yahoo or Google.