Netvibes, one of my favorite personalized portals, has announced they now have over 500 Netvibes Universes available. A Netvibes Universe is a customized, public personalized portal where you can find aggregated info on a certain subject. This customization includes an original header image and wallpaper, as well as many other details which cannot be changed on standard Netvibes pages.
For the time being, content creators are working with the Netvibes team to create Universes; but this feature should soon be available to everyone.
One of the 500 Netvibes Universes is our own FranticIndustries universe, where you can find a collection of RSS streams related to this site and its author. Feel free to check it out and tell us what you think.
and i still can’t create one. it’s not good web 2.0 style to privilege “content creators”. - what are these “content creators”? i don’t think that bloggers are meant by that (because i cant create one), and i’m not sure that most newspapers are content creators, because they buy content mostly from newsagencys and rewrite them, or read press releases and rewrite them (if we are lucky) …. so i think netvibes universes was the worst product launch since gmail (get suspicious before you have time to test it)
@franz: yes, it’s still unavailable to users. Netvibes still does offer more customization options than any other personalized portal, and you can do more by using the 3rd party customization module (Netvibes customize). But, you’re right, since they announced it, they should follow through and make it available to everyone.
re: your gmail reference: I think the folks at Netvibes would be more than happy to have a product as ‘unsuccessful’ as Gmail (:
gmail wasn’t unsuccesful .. but the product launch was the baddest publicity for google ever. the whole google privacy issues started with gmail, the talking began before they could use the product.
netvibes is not the same but also an example of a bad product launch.
to differ between old media content providers and netvibes fan’s is very bad style 2.0. netvibes should think about if it wants to become a murdoch-space or a facebook.
I agree with Stan. NetVibes remains the best portal…I have tried a few but this one comes a cut above the rest.