Netvibes

I have quite a few blogs that I like to read, and the information can be quite overwhelming and hard to keep track of without an RSS feeder or website that tracks and identifies any new posts on those blogs. These types of services sure beat having to go to each blog individually every day just to see if there has been an update or not. I was using bloglines.com, but yesterday my husband Greg introduced me to a new website called Netvibes. You can see his review on Netvibes here.

I am quite impressed with Netvibes. Apparently it has only been around for a month and a half, but already they have some great functionality going for them. I have already imported all the information on the blogs I enjoy into Netvibes. Being able to import them all at once is a great feature in itself, as it would have taken me at least an hour to do each one manually.

Here are my favorite features:

• Easy to navigate and move your content wherever you want on the page just by clicking and moving the mouse.
• The site differentiates between read and unread content
• Collapsible and expandible boxes for each blog. Also able to collapse or expand ALL at once if desired.
• Ability to customize how many posts you want to see for each individual blog. This is great for those blogs that are updated several times daily versus once a week.
• You can add your GMail account right on the page. I haven’t actually used this yet, but just knowing the capability is there is pretty cool.
• You can add “webnotes.” This is great for putting up reminders to yourself, especially if you make this your homepage in your browser which I fully intend on doing. And like the webpages you add, you can put it anywhere you like.
• You can mark all posts in a specific blog as “read” at one time.
• You can import the feed information from another feed reader, such as bloglines.com

Here is a print screen of part of my Netvibes.com page. It is small so it will still fit into my blog pages for those users with 800×600 screen resolutions. If you want to see a larger size, please click the image.

I have decided to replace bloglines with Netvibes. We’ll see how it goes, but so far I am happy with the results.