Netvibes, one of the best personalized portals around, has just launched a new service: Netvibes Premium Universe. If you remember, Netvibes Universe is a branded, customizable Netvibes home page which selected clients can create (see FranticIndustries Netvibes Universe here). The difference between your regular Netvibes home page and a Netvibes Universe is that Universe is public; e.i., customized by you, but meant for everyone to use.

The problem with Netvibes Universe is that it’s hard to get people to actually use them. Netvibes users already have their home page; people not familiar with Netvibes will have a hard time grasping the concept of universes. Enter Netvibes Premium Universe, which enables Netvibes’ partners to use Netvibes technology on their own site. In other words, you can add those cool drag&drop widgets to your own site, and brand and adapt it as you please.

Read/Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick is not exactly thrilled with the idea. I guess it depends on your point of view. If you’re a company that wants customizable homepage/portal functionality, but don’t want to develop it from scratch, partnering with Netvibes - if the price is right - might be a good idea. Of course, it all depends on how this works: is it a versatile, white label-style solution which can be adapted to any type of website, or is it just a regular Netvibes page which you can slap on your page and that’s it? The press release doesn’t really say. I hope I’ll get a hold of someone at Netvibes and clear this up. But, if Netvibes Premium Universe really enables anyone to easily implement Netvibes’ technology into their own website, it might be a winner.

For more Netvibes coverage see our comparison of five personalized portals.