My Community: Another Really Essential Widget for Netvibes

Now that all Netvibes users are upgrading to the Ginger release, let's examine the MY COMMUNITY widget created by the Netvibes team.

The idea is to get connected to your Friends by showing in real time your Friends activities, your own public activities and having a view over who are your friends and who is following you.

The real plus offered by Netvibes is that you can star (Share as favorite) and comment also the activities of your friends !! (and not only your news feeds). That way all your friends and followers will see it and, if they want, they can also share it with others ...

You can also copy/paste in the writing box and that is cool if you need a "specific" text and you can also write url that will open in a new page. That is useful if you want to give a link to another page. Images and other contnent can only be sent by their url.

As you can see from the capture you have limited editing possibilities.

What could be improved is to give the user the possibility :

1. to star also the Friends' Update : if George wrotes: "I am a new Dad" well it could be useful to be able to share it as favorite to "send it" to other friends that perhaps are not connected with George
2. to send a message to your own private activity: If I want to write : "Send a bottle to George but not the same as the one for peter" I do not want to show that to all ;)
3. to reply to someone with @name and not show that in the profile (is not a statement)
4. to have an option for a larger window to write text
5. to have an empty option to have an empty window
6. to mix my own public activities with my friends' one: it is easier to follow discussions
7. to add an image in the field (like in Twitxr.com), not just an image url as now.
8. to be able to import here other Social Messaging activities like Twitter. A special little icon would signify that a friend messaging me is not from Netvibes, but with an option I could answer him from Netvibes. That way I will have just one Social messaging tool.
9. to modify the icon of the message sender to know if it is a Friend or a Follower (perhaps with a different border or size) : if you have many friends and followers, very often they are not the same, you could reply to persons that do not see your messages :(
   
10. to change name of the widget.

MORE GENERAL REQUEST concerning Activities:

1. I would like to come back to a way to have 2 separate activities fields: private and public. In Beta there was an option to move an activity from private to public and viceversa and I liked it. It was opening new ways to use Netvibes and the Web ;)
2. Would be nice to be able to message directly to Friend or follower, not in public
   

NetEx rating : 4****/5

An essential widget that works immediatly and that allows you to really benefit from the social side of Netvibes.

I have add it in my list of REALLY Essential Widgets on my Universe, but the full version is only available in the personal page.

This widgets comes now as default in Ginger (the new version of Netvibes) but if you need another copy, you can get it from: Add Content/Assential Widgets/My Community