Second Positive impression on the new Ginger update from Netvibes

Hi,

This is the second part of my Ginger update testing.

I am testing this time the new Contacts option that is one of the most important improuvements of this Update as it is the begging of the social twist from Netvibes.

With the mouseover you can read on the Contacts' icon:
"subscribe to other's people universes and check out who is reading my stuff"

By clicking on it , your Netvibes page frees some space for:
Friends (and their Number)
Followers (and their number)
and a Find friends search

Friends are users with an Universe and that you have selected with "add friend" after having clicked on the user icon on the Upper right corner.
In the same way you can remove a friend.

Followers are people tha thave done the same with your Universe.

By clicking on the Friends and Followers icon of your Friends Universes you can visit other Universes and so on...

At the moment there is no limit to this, as there is no option to restrict the view of your Universe.

Find Friends is a search by email in GMAIL, Yahoo MAIL, Hotmail/MSN, Twitter, Flickr, AIM.
The Facebook icon is already there, but everyone is waiting for the Facebook decision "to free" their users => Another good reason to escape from Facebook ;) .
You have to give your Usernames and Passwords to access these services, but Netvibes states :"We won't store you login info or contact anyone without your permission.".

Trust them, as you already done to check you emails and other services and you may able to find other friends if they have registred with Netvibes with a "real email".
Yes, because, I must confess that at the beginning I used a fake one and it worked well... so my advice: Change for a good working email account if you want an upgrade with Ginger !

Can Netvibes become My Single Social Interface ?

Hi,


Just read a good post by Kin Lane on his blog about his reaction to Yahoo declaration that the future will be modeled on Facebook and emails. All started from a NYT paper stating that Google and Yahoo " hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks".


Kin lists his request for a "future" Single Social Interface that will be serving all your personal and professional needs in just one interface.


As I agree on the list here it is with my views on the ability of Netvibes to help. But first I want to state the big advantage, at the moment, for Netvibes: is "independent" from megagroups as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft..

1. My Profile - I want a single profile Not yet but possible with the help of http://openid.net/ + http://oauth.net/about/
2. Contacts - I want a single point of entry for people in my life Possible
3. Individual Communication - I want a single point of entry for all communications and prioritzed by the senders relationship with me Possible
4. Network Communication - I want to be able to communicate with my network of contacts, friends and family through any way that works for me and for them Possible
5. Public Communication - I need to communicate with the general public Not good enough
6. Information - All the information I need daily Almost perfect
7. Schedule - I should be able to easily manage my private and public schedule Not yet good enough
8. Storage - Everything should be in one central place and then be able to distribute where ever I need or want it. No good
9. Projects - Project tracking for everything I do So So
10. Applications / Tools - I really need an application framework that is desktop, rich, and web all at once Not available but needed

to be clear here is also a graph

So let's hope that Netvibes evolves fast in that direction!

Netvibes' Blog confirms Ginger release previews

Hi,

Also the Netvibes Blog has confirmed that the Ginger release will bring a social twist to the best Independent Homepage .

On the Developers side Netvibes "have decided that the moment the technology matures, to include all the existing Social APIs as plugins for UWA, Netvibes' Universal Widget API. "

The graph below summerizes that.

Netvibes will launch “Ginger” as a social widgets platform

Hi,

a few days ago I was the first to announce a Social networking twist from Netvibes and Tariq Krim, Netvibes' CEO and founder has just announced in the WEB2.0 conference in Berlin that Netvibes will launch a new released called ... "Ginger"and that release will be their social answer.

Netvibes, as reported by Mike Butcher of uk.techcrunch.com reporting live from Berlin, decided that it it was too late to go creating a new Social Network competing with Facebook, Opensocial and others, and has decided instead that " it was time Netvibes to tap into the existing social networks".

The idea is to mash Netvibe’s UWA widgets with social APIs like Google’s recently announced Open Social or the Facebook application platform.

Krim has declared : "We decided to re-engineer Netvibes around social services. When you see something on Netvibes and like it you can share it with friends on your public Netvibes timeline"

Watch here a demo of the new Ginger release (Quicktime).

The new Ginger release will present in the upper menu line a Friend icon that will call on your screen the icones of your friends and followers as in Twitter (like I had well guessed )

Among the new content offered, the demo shows a Weather's Friends widget.
I am quite sceptic for the use of such a widget but who knows...

Watch here a second demo of the Ginger release (Quicktime)
Here we can see another new icone on the upper menu line called : FLOW
By clicking on it , you will be able to check the activities of your friends on a timeline !!
You will have also a Private timeline and a public timeline. I guess that your public timeline will be the one available to your friends.
The Friends timeline is showing the activities of your friends: if they stared a link and which one, if they added a widget and which one, and so on...

On your personal timelines you will the same kind of informations.

I think that it is a good step for Netvibes, it gives a new dimension to your page even if you do not use as a social networking tool.

In the social networking field I think also that is the best move for Netvibes and it could provide a way to communicate between separated and closed social networking.

Netvibes could make people from Facebook and Myspace to meet in a single Netvibes page.

Just wait to see it from real !

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.