Netvibes: your page, your universe
About this startup
Netvibes is a startup founded in 2005 by Tariq Krim and Florent Frémont, based in Paris and London.
The service
Netvibes is a multi-lingual Ajax-based personalized start page. It is organized into tabs, with each tab containing user-defined modules. Built-in Netvibes modules include an RSS/Atom feed reader, local weather forecasts, a calendar supporting iCal, bookmarks, notes, to-do lists, multiple searches, support for POP3, IMAP4 email as well as several webmail providers including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL, Box.net web storage, del.icio.us, Meebo, Flickr photos, podcast support with a built in audio player, and several others. A page can be personalized further through the use of one of many existing themes or users can create their own theme with a wallpaper of their choosing. Customized tabs, feeds and modules can be shared with others individually or via the Netvibes Ecosystem.
The Netvibes Ecosystem is a collection of user submitted modules/widgets built using Netvibes Universal Widget API (UWA), feeds, podcasts, events, tabs, and “universes”. A “universe” is essentially a publicly viewable customized page of another entity. There currently exist universes for everything from Time (magazine) [1] to Mandy Moore [2], and soon any user will be able to share a portion of their Netvibes page publicly as a universe.