A personal start page is a single page that can be accessed from any computer and typically serves as the homepage for a browser. There are many solutions for personal start pages, including a homebrewed page, iGoogle, and Netvibes. I’ve used both homebrewed pages and iGoogle in the past, but eventually stray from them.
I thought I’d give Netvibes a try. It offers a broad range of dashlets (individual panes you place on the page) that cover a ton of topics. The neat thing about Netvibes is you can drag and drop your dashlets in any configuration you want. You can also create multiple tabs for specific content groups. The page in general is pretty customizable.
The reason Netvibes a good personal start page manager is that creating a page is extremely easy. It’s literally drag and drop to get things where you want. You can even customize the dashlet colors, how many columns there are, etc. There is even a wizard that will create a custom page based on your likes and location. The key selling point of the service is simplicity.
If you’re using Netvibes, what do you like and dislike about it?
2 comments so far ↓
September 17th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I’ve seen the Netvibes name before, but never knew what it was. Thanks for giving me the push to go check it out. In my opinion, this is WAY better than iGoogle. I’ve set up several different mail fetcher accounts and am including some RSS feeds as well.
With the ability to have different tabs, I can easily keep track of my work, personal and other interests, all from one location. This will be a great launching page for me to use.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I have found that netvibes is wayyyyy too slow to start up. The look and set-up is nice but it takes too long to actually “start up”.
I get the same results on 3 computers on 2 different connections so I know it is not the broadband connection. Seems as though Netvibes is just bloated.