Finally, the long awaited sequel to my post on aggregators!
So the second aggregator I tried was Netvibes. Netvibes is a web application with customizable widgets for users to gather all their social media together into a “Dashboard” or homepage. From their webpage:
“Get your own personal dashboard to monitor all your favorite blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and all of your favorite interests. Just type in a topic and get your free personal dashboard now.”
They also offer some pre-designed dashboards built around particular interests. There is a personal and a business version of the application, the personal version is completely free. Kansas State University professor Dr. Michael Wesch uses Netvibes as an interactive teaching tool to engage his students, educate them with and about new web tools and social media applications, and have them collaborate on a variety of projects.
I spent over two hours customizing my dashboard, but I have to admit a lot of that was due to me trying to decide what theme I wanted for my title bar and background. I have two pages, the main dashboard and then one just for academic/ work. Finding and adding widgets was simple and intuitive. There are lots of options and you can add almost all common social media feeds and applications. So far I haven’t found something I wanted to add but couldn’t.
Here are my two pages:
I have been using my Netvibes dashboard (which I titled “Engage”) as my homepage for a week and a half now. I have had to make an adjustment to my normal routine when I sit down to my computer and open my browser, but I am enjoying it. It does the one main thing I really wanted which is it has on one page all the sites I check regularly and it tells me when they’re updated. I can read my RSS feeds within the dashboard, or go to the site which is nice. Most of the time I still click through to the main website to read the updates.
So far my only real problem with my netvibes site is that there is no help section for when I’m having trouble with a widget. I haven’t managed to get my gmail calendar widget to update yet and Netvibes has no support to help me figure out what is wrong.
I can definitely see using this type of application to create a class or office homepage. I think it has a lot of possibility and it doesn’t take too much time to set up (if you don’t fiddle with colours for hours). Keep in mind though, it is more of a portal rather than a one stop shop. It is aptly named a dashboard. It will help you get you where you want to go, and hopefully do it faster and with less distractions along the way.
Engage will be my homepage for a while longer.