Will the new Ginger release bring some social networking to Netvibes ?

Hi,

We are waiting for a new Ginger release of Netvibes.

Looking at the only picture I have found on the subject published on the occasion of the Widget Summit 2007 in San Francisco...

... you can imagine that the Netvibes could become more social by presenting on the first 2 rows of the screen a selection of pictures of avatars of friends and/or relations.

It reminds me a little of Twitter.com that I know most of the Netvibes team use.

Position of Netvibes in the Starting Pages market

Hi,

here is a comment I posted in the ReadWriteWeb post about the position of Netvibes in the market of Starting Pages:

"Netvibes is not the pioneer of startpages, but if you consider WEB 2.0 market for startpages, Netvibes is, at the moment, the leading competitor in terms of:
1) independence from MegaGroups,
2) collaborative creation of content,
3) overall quality,
4) international openess,
5) general compatibility (IE, FF..; PC-MAC, PC-mobile,)...

In my point of view what is missing is the attractiveness for the BIG AUDIENCE.

In my analysis, Netvibes and the other starting pages are used mainly used for Feed reading.

All the other possible practical uses are yet to be publicised (or discovered).

But CONTENT is always the key for success. It must not be Netvibes OWN content but a starting page has to give you the content you need (even if you do not know it already). "

Netvibes launches the PREMIUM UNIVERSES

Hi,

Netibes is now launching the announced NETVIBES PREMIUM UNIVERSES.

As I published in a previous post end of August, Netvibes is now offering to Publisher to help them to create widgets with their own content and also to distribute them everywhere.
Basically is a Netvibes page in an iframe on the publisher website.

The offer considers:

-All the publisher feeds presented in one single widget. (Several thematic widgets can be created on demand).
- Premium Widgets can be branded just as a media property on its own.
- Built with UWA (Universal Widget API) : widgets can be installed in one click on Netvibes, Microsoft Vista, iGoogle, Apple Dashboard, iPhone, Live.com, etc.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb is quite cautious on the success chances for this new service by Netvibes stating "I don't know how many companies will go for it".

For me, is just a piece of action in the CREATION OF CONTENT that will guarantee a long independent life to Netvibes.

New estimates for Netvibes unique internet users.

Hi,

new estimates from COMPETE.COM give 207.638 unique "US internet users visiting the site" for August 2007.

As you can see from their graph the growth is important since December 2006.

The Compete.com definition for "people visiting the site" is:

"People Counts are also known as unique visitors - they only count a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month. People Counts are typically used to determine how popular a site is.
Recommendation: To best understand the popularity of a site, you should consider additional metrics beyond People Counts.
For instance, Site X could drive up its People Count by buying a lot of advertising across the Internet. However, many of these people may leave the site immediately. Use Engagement metrics to understand how much time people spend on a site and how many pages they look at on average during each visit to more fully understand the site's popularity."

French site LA VIGIE also estimated in April 2007 the NETVIBES UNIQUE VISITORS just for France at 150.00 (measures by Nielsen Netratings)

In August 2007, Compete.com counted 2.350.817 visits made to the site (a person can be counted as one person in the month (see previous count) but can make multiple visits).

A rapid calculation 2.350.000 visits/208.000 users gives an Average of 11 visits by person or 1 every 3 days for Netvibes.

Ginger will be the new version of Netvibes

Hi,

Tariq Krim, Netvibes CEO and founder, announced on the 29th of September that the new version of Netvibes on which they are working will be named: GINGER.

After CORIANDER in February 2007, and CINNAMON just last year (October2006),
ANISE in April 2006, another spice name is coming.

No date is available for the new release.