03/03/2008

How to improve the (social) Activities of Netvibes


The Activities tab in he Ginger release of Netvibes offers 3 choices :

  1. Your own personal activity that you want to keep for yourself . You will have a list of all the links you starred (shared as favorite), the Widgtes and RSS feeds you have installed, the Friends you are following or that you added, ... but also the Widgets and feeds you decided to archive.
  2. Your Public Activity: your "shared as favorite" feeds or links and your Status Updated
  3. Friends' Activity: is "your Friends' Public Activity "
For Your Private and Public Activity you have 2 options: comment and delete.
For your Friends you only have "Share as favorite" option if it was a Public Activity of the Friend but you can not do anything with their Update Status.

You have a search activities that helps you find "old" activities but you have to remember the exact title or the good friend.

The use of the My Community Widget (4****/5) simplifies a lot the Update Status of my profile and is the easiest way to check your Activities and your Contacts. (Get it from : in your private page/add content/essential widgets/My community)

But some improvement would increase the usability and then the interest in what is the Social Side of Netvibes:

Among practical Improvements it would be nice to be able to:
  • star, write a short text and/or save a links/feed just for the Private Activity
  • change an activity from Public to Private and viceversa (this option was existing)
  • send a Direct Message to one single friend directly (perhaps on his MyWall widget?)
  • view in My Activities the posts of other Social services like Twitter
  • post and view images like in Twixtr.com
  • have the option to view My own Public Activities mixed with My Friends Activities (like in Twitter ) because is it easier to follow a discussion
  • increase the number of activities in the Widget (20 is very small you work and write a lot or if you have a lot of friends ;) )
  • give the possibility to filter and backup your Best activities for future use
Among other futuristic features I dream of there is :
  • a Web Browser plug-in that would allow me to Star (share as favorite) any content I would see on the web directly in my Netvibes page with a comment to be shared with friends or just archived for myself.

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