On aggregators and dishwashers
I finally found some time to give Netvibes a try last week, and in no time I was sold it. Well, sort of, because it's free.
Netvibes lets you start putting together straight away your own personal collection of RSS feeds, sticky
notes, photos from your Flickr
contacts, and your email headlines.
If you decide you want to access it from any computer, you can register and then log on from anywhere.
I had shortly tried MyYahoo!'s very similar
offer a while back, only to give up because:
- MyYahoo! does not let me organise content in tabs (I have set up tabs in Netvibes and grouped RSS feeds by content: personal, blogs, technology, news;
- MyYahoo! is littered with space-wasting ads;
- it prompts me to 're-enter my password for security reasons' every other time I log on;
- Netvibes lets me add as many 'sticky notes' as I want, which I am now using to replace the notes I used to write down on my mobile or to email to myself from home to work and viceversa: food intake, expenses, 'todos';
- MyYahoo! failed to load properly a few of my feeds;
which is a shame really, because on the whole I am kind of partial to the Yahoo! experience and I'd like to see them do well among the Googles and Microsofts on the market.
After having used Netvibes for less than a week now, I look back with disbelief at a time not so far back when I had to log on to several online services to keep a lid on things.
So NewsGator is collecting digital dust now. As is our washing-up bowl since a dishwasher entered our lives when we moved two months ago. I now cannot imagine why anyone would voluntarily want to do the washing up, after having experienced the gentle hum that tells you that little pixies are scrubbing away your tea stains while you relax and get on with your life.